The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

j 

Aleksandr I. Solz.henitsyn 

THE GULAG 

ARCHIPELAGO 

1918-1956 

An Experiment in Literary Investigation 

·III-IV 

Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney 

HARPER.&: ROW. PUBLISHERS 

New York. Evanston. San FrfJllcisco. London 

tfj 

.1817

Contents 

PART III The Destructive-Labor Camps 

1. The Fingers of Aurora 9 

2. The Archipelago Rises from the Sea 25 

3. The Archipelago Metastasizes 71 

- 

4. The Archipelago Hardens 121 

5. What the Archipelago Stands On 142 

6. "They've Brought the Fascists!" 168 

·7. The Ways of Life arvi Customs of the 

Natives 198 

8. Women in Camp 227 

9. The Trusties 251 

10. In Place of Politicals 292 

11. The Loyalists 322" 

12. Knock, Knock, Knock . .. 353 

13. Hand Over Your Second Skin Too! 375 

14. Changing One's Fate! 391 

15. Punishments 414 

16. The Socially Friendly 425 

v 

vi 

CONTBNTS 

17. The Kids 447 

18. The Muses in Gulag 468 

19. The Zeks as a Nation 502 

20. The Dogs' Service 534 

21. Campside 564 

22. We Are Building 577 

PART IV The Soul and Barbed WJ.l'e ' 

1. The Ascent 597 

2. Or Corruption? 618 

3. Our Muzzled Freedom 632 

4. Several Individual Stories 656 

Translator's Notes 673 

Glossary 679 

Index 693

THEDESTRtlCTIVE-{ABORCAMPS 

PART III 

The Destructive-Labor 

Camps· 

• 

"Only those can understand· us who ate from the same 

bowl with us." 

Quotation from a letter of a Hutzul* girl. a former zek 

• See Trans/ators Notes. page 673.

Labor Railroads 

camps -t-He built by convicts 

nmin· Canals 

'~-~-'~ 

o 300 800 900 kin

·i 

I 

Solzhenitsyn, July, 1946, as a prisoner in the Kaluga Gates Camp, Moscow

There is no limit to what should be included in this part. To 

attain and encompass its savage meaning one would have to drag 

out many lives in the camps--the very same in which one cannot 

survive for even one term without some special advantage because 

they were invented for de!truction. 

And from this it follows that all those who drank of this most 

deeply, who explored it most fully, are already in their graves 

and cannot tell us. No one now can ever tell us the most important 

thing about these-camps. 

And the wh9le scope of this story and of this truth is beyond 

the capabilities of one lonely pen. All I had was a peephole into 

the Archipelago, not the view from a tower. But, fortunately, 

several other books have emerged and more will emerge. In the 

,Kolyma.Stories of Shalamov the. reader will perhaps feel more 

truly and surely the pitilessness of· the spirit· of the Arcliipelago 

and the limits of human despair. 

To taSte the sea all one needs is one gulp:

10 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

Chapter 1 

• 

The Fingers of Aurora 

Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called 

Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first 

early morning of the Archipelago. 

When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mihajlov 

claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed 

in our country as far back as 1921, many of us (and many in the 

West too) were astonished: That early really? Even in 1921? 

Of course not! Of course Mihajlov was in error. In 1921, in 

fact, concentration camps were already in full flower (already 

even coming to an end). It would be far more accurate to say that 

the Archipelago was born with the shoL of the cruiser 

Aurora. * 

And how could it have been otherwise? Let us pause to 

ponder. 

Didn't Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery 

of compulsion had to be broken up, and a new one created immediately 

in its place? And included in the machinery of compulsion 

were: the army (we are not surprised that the Red Army 

was created at the beginning of 1918); the police (the Qlilitia* 

was inaugurated even sooner than the army); the courts (from 

November 22, 1917); and the prisons. How, in establishing the 

dictatorship of the proletariat, could they delay with a new type 

of prison? 

That is to say that it was altogether impermissible to delay in 

the matter of prisons, whether old or new. In the first ttronths after 

the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding "the most 

9 

decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline."! And are 

dracoruc measures possible-without prison? 

What new could the proletarian state contribute here? Lenin 

was feeling out new paths. In December, 1917, he suggested for 

consideration the following assortment of punishments: "confiscation 

of all property ... confinement in prison, dispatch to the front 

and forced labor for all who disobey the eXisting law."2 Thus. we 

can observe that the leading .idea of the Archipelago-forced 

labor-had been advanced in the first month after the October 

Revolution. 

And even while sitting peacefully among the fragrant hay mowings 

of Razliv* and listening to the buzzing bumblebees, Lenin 

could not help but ponder the future penal system. Even then 

he had worked things out and reassured us: ''The suppression of 

the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of 

yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, 

that it is going to cost much less in blood ... will be much cheaper 

for humanity" than the preceding suppression of the majority by 

the minority.3 

According to the estimates of emigre Professor of Statistics 

Kurganov, this "comparatively easy"·internal repression cost us, 

from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a 

total of ... sixty-six million-66,OOO,OOO-lives. We, of course, 

cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. 

And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can 

make the necessary critical comparisons. 

It. is interesting to compare. other figures. How large was the 

total staff of the central apparatus of the terrifying Tsarist Third 

Department, which runs like a strand through all the great· 

Russian literature? At the time of its creation it had sixteen persons, 

and at its height it had forty-five'. A ridiculously small num- . 

ber for even the remotest Cheka provincial headquarters in the 

country. Or, how many political prisoners did the February 

Revolution find in the Tsarist "Prison of the Peoples"? All these 

figures do exist somewhere ... In all probability there were more 

than a hundred such prisoners in the Kresty Prison alone, and 

several hundred returned from Siberian exile and hard labor, and 

l. Lenin, Sobrallllye Soclrillelliya (Collected Works), fifth edition, Vol. 36, 

p.217. 

2. Ibid., Vol. 35, p. 176. 

3. Ibid., Vol. 33, p. 90.

· The Fingers of Aurora I 11 

Jtow many more were languishing in the prison of every provincial 

capital! But it is interesting to know--exactIy how m~y. He~ is 

a figure for Tambov, taken from the fierY local papers. The February 

Revolution, which 'opened wide the doors of the Tambov 

Prison, found there political prisoners in the number of .•. seven 

(7) persons. And there were more than forty provinces. (It is 

superfluous to recall that from February to July, 1917, there were 

no political arrests, and after July the number imprisoned could 

be counted on one's fingers.) 

Here, however, was the trouble: The first Soviet government. 

was a coalition government, and a portion of the people's commissariats 

had to be allotted, like it or not, to the Left SR's, including, 

unhappily, the People's Commissariat of Justice, which 

fell to them. Guided by rotten petty bourgeois concepts of freedom, 

this People's Commissariat of Justice brought the penal 

system to the verge of ruin. The sentences turned out to be too 

light, and they made hardly any use at all of the progressive 

principle of forced labor. In February, 1918, the Chairman of 

the Council of ,People's Commissars, Comrade Lenin, demanded 

that the number of places of imprisonment be increased and that. 

repression of criminals be intensified,4 and in May, already going' 

over to concrete. guidance, he gave instructions 5 that the sentence 

for bribery must be not less than ten years of prison and ten years 

of forced labor in addition, i.e., a total of twenty years. This 

scale might seem pessimistic at first: would forced labor really 

still be necessary after twenty years? But. we know -that forced 

labor tumed out to be a. very long-lived meas~e, and that even 

after fifty years it would still be extremely popular. . 

For many months after the October Revolution the prison . 

personnel everywhere remained Tsarist, 8nd the only new officials 

named were Commissars of prisons. The brazen jailers went so 

far as to create their own trade union ("The Union of Prison 

Employees") and established an elective basis for prison administration! 

(The orily time in all Russian history!) The prisoners 

were not to be left behind either~they, too, had their own internal 

self-government. (Circular of the People's Commissariat of Justice, 

April 24, 1918: prisoners, wherever possible, were to be 

brought into self-verification and self-supervision.) 

4. Ibid., Vol. S4, p. 391. 

S. Ibid., Vol. SO, p. 70. 

\ 

q I TBB GULAG ARCB'lPBLAGO 

. Naturally such a free commune of convicts ("anarchlcallicentiousness") 

did not correspond to.the needs of the dictatorship of 

the progressive claSs 'and was of sorry help in purging harmful 

insects from the Russian land. (And what could one expect-if 

the prison chapels had not been closed, and our Soviet prisoners 

• were willingly going there on Sundays, even if only to pass the 

tiIqe!) . 

Of course, even the Tsarist jailers were not entirely a loss to the 

proletariat, for after all theirs was a profession important to the 

most immediate purposes of the Revolution. And therefore it was 

nCCC!lsary to "select those persons of the prison administration who 

have not become totally calloqsed and stupefied il) the patterns of 

Tsarist prisons [And what does 'not totally' mean? And how 

would you find that out? Does it mean they had forgotten 'God 

save the Tsar'?] who can be used for work at the new tasks.'" 

(Did they, for example, answer precisely, "Yes, sir!" and "No, 

sir," or turn the key in the lock quickly?) And, of course, the 

prison buildings themselves, their cells, their bars and locks, although 

in appearance they. remained e~act1y as before; in actual 

fact had acquired a new class pontent, a lofty revolutionary meaning. 

And nevertheless, the habit of the courts, right up to the middle 

of 1918, of keeping right on, out of inertia, sentencing "to prison, 

to prison,"·slowed the breakup of the old machinery of state in 

its prison area. ... 

In the middle of 1918, to be exact on July 6, an event took 

place whOse significance is not grasped by everyone, an event 

superficially known as the "suppression of the revolt of the Left 

SR's." ·But this was, in fact, a coup d'etat, of hardly any less 

significance than October 25. On October 25 the power-the 

government-of the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies 

was proclaimed, whence the name Soviet power. But in its first 

months this new government was very much beclouded by the 

presence in it of other parties besides· the Bolsheviks. Although 

the coalition government consisted only of the Bolsheviks and 

the Left SR's, nonetheless, in the membership of the All-Russian 

Congresses (the Second, Third, and Fourth), and of the All 

Russian Central Executiye Committees (VTsIK's) which they 

elected, there were still included some representatives of other 

6. Sovetsktiyo Yus/itsiyo (a conection of articles, Soviet Ius/ice), Mosc:ow, 

1919, p. 20.

I~ 

The Fingers 0/ Aurora I 13 

socialist parties-SR's, Social Democrats, Anarchists, Popular . 

Socialists, etc. Because of this fact the VTslK's possessed the unhealthy 

character of "socialist parliaments." But in the course 

of the first months of 1918, by a whole series of decisive measures 

(supported by the Left SR's), the representatives of the other 

socialist parties were either expelled from VTsIK (by its own 

decision, an original parliamentary procedure) or else were 

simply not allowed to be elected to it. The last non-Bolshevik 

party, which still constituted one-third of the parliament (the 

Fifth Congress of Soviets), was the Left SR's. And the time finally 

came to get rid of them too. On July 6, 1918, they were excluded 

in toto from VTslK and from the Council of People's Commissars. 

Thereby the power of the Soviet of Deputies (by tradition. 

called the "Soviet") ceased to stand in opposition to the will of 

the Bolshevik: Party and took the form of the Democracy of a 

New Type. 

Only on this historic day could the reconstructipn of the old 

prison machinery and the creation of the Archipelago really begin.1 

• 

And the direction of this desired reconstruction had long since 

been understood. After all, Marx himself had pointed out in his 

"Critique of the Gotha Program" that productive labor was the 

only method of prisoner correction. It was clear, of course; as 

Vyshinsky explained much later on, that what was meant here" 

was "not that kind of work which dries out the mind and the hejlrt 

of a human being," but "the miracle worker [!] which transfonits 

people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes."8 Why 

is it that our prisoner must not chew the rag or read nilfe little 

books in a cell, but must labor instead? Because ,in the Republic 

of the Soviets there can be no place for forced idleness, for that 

"forced parasitism''9 which could exist in a parasitical society, for 

example in Schliisselburg. Such idleness as this on the part of 

prisoners would have very simply been contrary to the bases of 

the work structure of the Soviet Republic as defined in the Con- 

7. In the clumsily high-flying language of Vyshinsky: "The process, unique 

in the world, possessing genuine universal historical significance, of creating, on 

the ruins of the bourgeois system of prisons, those 'houses of the dead' which 

were built by the exploiters for the workers, of new institutions with new social 

content." A. Y. Vyshinsky (editor), 01 Tyurem k Vospitalelnym Uchrezhdeniyam 

(From Prisons to Rehabilitative Institutions), Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo 

Publishing House, 1934, preface. 

8. Ibid., p. !O. 

9. Ibid., p. 103. 

14 I THB GULAG 'ARCHtPBLAGO 

stitution of July 10,1918: "He who does not work does.not eat." 

Consequently, if the prisoners were not set to work, they were, 

according to the Constitution, to be deprived of their bread ration. 

The Central Penal Department of the People's Commissariat 

of Justice,UI which had been created in May, 1918, had immediately 

begun to send off to work the then~xisting zeks ("began to 

organize productive labor"). B!Jt this legislation had been pro-' 

claimed only after the July coup-to be preCise, on July. 23, 1918 

-in ''Temporary instructions on deprivation of fteedom":l1 

"Those· deprived of freedom who are capable of labor must be. 

r'ecruited for physical work 0/;1 a compuls,!ry basis." 

One can say that the camps originat~ and the Archipelago 

was born from this particular instructIon of July 23~ 1918 (nine 

months after the October Revolution). (Someone may enter a 

reproach that this-hirth was premature?) 

The necessity offorced labor by prisoners (which was, anyway 

quite clear for everyone by then) was further cl8rlfied at the 

Seventh All-Union Congress of the Soviets: "Labor is the best 

means of paralyzing the disintegrating influence ... of the endless 

conversations of prisoners among themselves in the course of 

which the more experienced instruct the newcomers."12 (Aha, so 

that's why!) 

Soon after that there began the Communist "subbotniki"·..:-. 

''voluntary Saturdays." And that same People's Commissariat of 

Justice issued an appeal:. "It is essential to teach [the prisoners] 

to become accustomed to Communist, collective labor."IB In 

other words, the spirit of the Communist "subbotniki" was to be 

applied to the forced-labor camps. 

And that is how that hasty epoch instantly heaped up a mountain 

of problems which it took decades to sort out. 

The bases of corrective-labor policy were included in the 

Party program at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist 

Party (March, 1919). The complete organizationilI structuring 

of the camp net.work throughout Soviet Russia coincided rigidly 

10. After the Brest-Litovsk Peace the Left SR's left the government, and the 

People's Commissariat of Justice was headed by Bolsheviks. 

11. These instructions continued to exist during the whole course of the 

Civil War, right up until November, 1920. 

12. Qtclzyot N. K.Y. VII Vsesoyuznomu Sye~d/l Sovetov (Report by the 

People's Commissariat of J/lstice to the Seventh All-Union Congress of Soviets), 

p. 9. 

13. Materialy N. K. Y. (Materials of tile People's Commissariat 0/ Justice), 

Vol. VII, p. 137.

The Fingers of Aurora 15 

with die first Communist subbotniki (April 12-May 17, 1919): 

the decrees of VTsIK on camps for forced labor were issued on 

April 15, 1919, and May 17, 1919.14 Under their provisions, 

camps for forced labor were obligatorily created (by the pr9- 

vincial" Cheka) in each provincial capital (if convenient, within 

" the city limits, or in a monastery or on a nearby country estate) 

and also in several counties as well (although for the time being 

not in all of them). The camps were required to accommodate no 

fewer than three hundred persons each (in order that the cost of 

the-guard and the administration should be paid for "by the prisoners' 

labor), and they were under the jurisdiction of the Provincial 

Penal Departments. 

The early fC?rced-Iabor camps seem to us nowadays to be something 

intangible. The people imprisoned in them seem not to have 

said anything to anyone--there is no testimony. Literature and 

memoirs, when they speak of War CommuniS'm, recall executions 

and prisons~ but do not have a thing to say about camps. And 

nowhere, even between the lines, nowhere outside the text, are 

they implied. So it was natural for Mihajlo Mihajlov to make his 

mistake. Where were those camps? What were their names? What 

did they look like? 

The Instruction of July 23, 1918, had the decisive fault (noted 

by all jurists) that nothing was mentioned there about class differentiation 

among the prisoners, in other words that some prisoners 

should be maintained in better conditions and some in worse. 

But it did outline the labor system~d that is the only reason 

we can get any picture of what they were like. The workday was 

set at eight hours. Because of the novelty of it all, the hasty decision 

was made to pay the prisoners for all their work, other 

than camp maintenance, at 100 percent of the rates of the corresponding 

trade unions. (Oh, what a monstrous thing! The pen 

can hardly bear to write it!) (They were being compelled to work 

by the Constitution, and they were also being paid according to 

the same Constitution-logical enough!) It is true that the Cost 

of maintenance of the camp and the camp guard was" deducted 

from their wages. For "conscientious" prisoners there was a 

special benefit: to be allowed to live in a private apartment "~d 

to come to the camp for work only. And release ahead of term 

14. SobTaniye Uzakonenii RSFSR za 1919 (Collection 0/ Legis/ative Acts 0/ 

the R,s.F,s.R./OT 1919), No. 12, p. 124, and No. 20, p. 235. 

16 I THE GUl.AG A_J!;C1UPEl.AGO 

was promised as a reward for "spe4?iallabor enthusiasm." And in 

general there were no detailed instructions on the regimen, and 

every camp had its own. "In the period of building a new govern- . 

mental system, taking into account the great overcrowding of 

places of confinement [I-my italics-A.S.] there was no time 

to think: about the regimen in the camps. All the attention was 

being directed to unburdening the prisons."ID Something like that 

reads like a hieroglyphic fi:om Babylon. How many questions im~ 

mediately suggest themselves~ What was going on in those 

wretched prisons? And what were the social-causes of such over 

-crowding? And is one to understand the matter of unburdening 

the prisons to mean executions or dispatching prisoners to camps? 

And what did it mean by saying it waS impossible to give any 

thought to the regimen in the camps? Did this mean that the People's 

Commissariat of Justice did not have tiine to safeguard the 

prisoner against the arbitrary actions of the local camp cliief? Is 

that the only way this can be read? There were no instructions 

about the regimen, and in the years ofthe Revolutionary Sense of 

lustice every petty tyrant could do just as he pleased with the 

prisoners? 

From the meager statistics (all from that very same collection, 

Soviet lustice) we learn: in general the work in.camps was menial. 

In 1919 only 2.5 percent of the prisoners worked in workshops, 

and in 1920 only 10 percent. It is also known that at the end of 

1918 the Central Penal Department* (what a moniker-it makes 

the flesh creep!) sought the establishment of agricultural colonies. 

It is known that in Moscow several brigades made up of prisoners 

were established to carry out repairs on water pipes, heating systems, 

and plumbing in nationl1Iized buildings. (And these ap 

·parently unescorted prisoners wandered about with monkey 

wrenches, soldering irons, and pipes through the corridors of 

government organizations and institutions, in the apartments of 

the bigwigs of those times, summoned by their wiveS by telephone 

to carry out repairs-and were never mentioned in any memoir, 

in 'any play, or in any film.) 

_ But the for~ed-Iabor camps were nonetheless not the first camps 

in file R.S.F.S.R. 

IS. Materialy N. K. Y •• 1920._Vol. VII.

).er~d 

The Fingers 0/ Aurora I 17 

The reader has already read the term concentration camp 

"kontslager"-several times in the sentences of the tribunals 

(Part I, Chapter 8) and concluded, perhaps, that we were guilty 

of an error, of making careless use of terminology subsequently 

developed'? No, this is not the case. 

In August, 1918, several days before the attempt on his life 

by Fanya Kaplan, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a telegram to 

Yevgeniya Boshlo and to the Penza Provincial Executive' Committee 

(they were unable to cope with a peasant revolt): "Lock 

up all the doubtful ones [not "guilty," mind you, but doubtful 

A.S.] in a concentration camp outside the city."17 (And in addition 

"carry out merciless mass terror" -this was before the 

Only on September 5, 1918, ten days after this telegram, was 

the Decree on -the Red Terror published, which was signed by 

Petrovsky, Kursky, and Bonch-Bruyevich. In addition to the instructions 

on mass executions, it stated in particular: "Secure the 

Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in 

concentration camps."IS 

So that is where this term--concentration camps-was discovered 

and immediately seized upon and confirmed--one of the 

principal terms of the twentieth century, and it was to have a big 

international future! And this is when it was born-in August and 

September, 1918. The word itself had already been used during 

World War I, but in relation to POW's and undesirable foreigners. 

But here in 1918 it was for the first time applied to the citizens of 

one's own country. The switch in meaning is easily comprehended: 

concentration camps for POW's were not prisons but a 

necessary precautionary concentration of the POW's. And so, too, 

for doubtful compatriots extrajudicial precautionary concentration 

was now proposed. For an energetic mind which could visualize 

barbed wire surrounding prisoners who had not been tried, 

the necessary term was right at hand--concentration camps. 

And while the forced.labor camps of the People's Commissariat 

of Justice belonged to the category of general places of 

16. To this now forgotten woman was entrusted at this time-via the line 

of authority of the CentrnJ Committee of the Party and of the Cheka as wellthe 

fate of all Penza Province. 

17. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. SO, pp. 143-144. 

18. Sobraniye Uzakonenii za 1918 (Collection of Legislative Acts for 1918), 

. No. 65, p. 710. 

18 I THE GULAG ARC'HIPELAGO 

confinement, the concentration camps were in no sense "general 

places," but were under the direct administration of the Cheka 

and were maintained for particularly hostile elements and for 

hostages. True, in the future, prisoners would be sent to concentration 

camps by tribunals as well; but people never tried kept 

pouring in automatically, sent there only on the basis of hostility.lO 

For escape from a ~oncentration camp the sentence was multiplied 

by ten-also without trial. (This was in tune with the times: 

- ''Ten for one!" "One hundred for one!") Consequently, if a 

prisoner had a five-year sentence and escaped and was caught, 

then his sentence was automatically extended to 1968. For a second 

escape from'a concentratiOl;l camp, execution was prescribed 

(and, of course, was punctiliously carried out). 

In the Ukraine, concentration camps were created somevJhat 

later-in 1920. 

But the creative thinking of our young Soviet justice did not 

content itself with this. Very shortly, even the concentration 

camps, which would seem to have had a firm class foundation, 

came to be considered insufficiently severe, insufficiently purposeful. 

In 1921 the Northern Special Purpose Camps were 

founded (not for nothing was.that label, special, attached to 

them). They had as their acronym SLON. '" The first such caml's 

arose in Pertominsk, Kholmogory, and just outside Archangel itself.20 

However, these places were evidently considered difficult 

to· guard and unsuitable for large concentrations of prisoners. 

And the gaze of the higher-ups naturally fell on the nearby Solovetsky 

Islands ("Solovki"), with their already built-up establishments, 

and their stone buildings, located twelve to twenty-five 

miles from the mainland, sufficiently close for the jailers, and 

sufficiently distant to discourage escapees, with no communication 

'with the mainland for half the year-a harder nut to crack than 

Sakhalin. 

And once Solovki had been selected and established, recollections 

of the forced-Iabor-camps, the concentration camps, and the 

19. Vyshinsky. op. cit. 

20. The magazine Solovetskiye Ostrova (The Solovetsky Islands), 1930, No. 

2-3, p. 55. From the report of the Chief of Administration of SLON, Comrade 

Nogtev. in Kem. When nowadays tourists are shown the so-called "Camp 

of the Government of Chaikovsky," at the mouth of the Dvina River, one 

would have to be in the know to realize that this was one of the first Northern 

"Special Purpose Camps." 

'

The Fingers of Aurora I 19 

Special Purpose Camps vanished from the popular mind! Because 

Solovki was not kept secret in the twenties, and in actual fact 

ears buzzed with Solovki. They openly used "Solovki" to scare. 

people with. They were publicly proud ~f Solovki. (They had the 

brass to be proud of it!) Solovki was even a symbol. There were 

as man,l'-jokes about it in vaudeville acts as you can imagine. 

After aU, classes had already disappeared (whither?), and Solovki 

itself w~ soon to come to an end. Subscriptions to the internal 

camp magazine, The Solovetsky Islands, were boldly sold 

throughout the Soviet Union. 

But the camp rootlets went deeper, deeper, and it is simply that 

we have lost count of their places and traces. There is no one 

now to tell us about most of those first concentration camps. 

Arid only from the last testimony of those few surviving first concentration 

camp inmates can we glean and preserve a little 

bit. 

At that tiine the authorities. used to love to set up their concentration 

camps in former monasteries: they were .enclosed by 

strong walls, had good solid. buildings, and they were empty . 

. (After all, monks are not human beings and could be tossed out 

at will.)' Thus in Moscow there were concentration camps. in 

Andronnikov, Novospassky, and Ivanovsky monasteries. In the 

Petrograd Krasnaya Gazeta of September 6, 1918, we can read' 

that the first concentration camp "will be set up in Nizhni Novgorod 

in an empty nunnery .... And initially it is planned to send 

five thousand persons to the concentration camp in Nizhni Novgorod." 

(My italics-A.S.) _ 

In Ryazan the c,oncentration. camp ,was also set up in a former 

nllIll;lery (Kazansky). And here is what they say about it. Imprisoned 

there were merchants, priests, and so-called "war prisoners" 

(as they called captured officers who had not served in 

the Red Army~. But there was also another segment of the pris: 

oner population which fitted into no simple category .. (For example, 

the Tolstoyan I. Y--v, whose trial we have already read 

about, was kept here.) Attached to the camp were workshopsa 

weaving shop, a tailor shop, a shoemaker's shop-and there 

was also repair and construction work in the city-"general 

work"· (in 1921 they were already calling it that). To this the 

prisoners were taken by convoy, but those who worked as individual 

craftsmen, because of the kind of work they did, were·al- 

20 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

lowed to go without convoy, and the citizens fed the latter in their 

homes. The population, of Ryazan was very sympathetic toward 

the deprivees, as they were called. (Officially they were called 

not prisoners but "persons deprived of freedom.") A· paSsing 

column of them would be given aim!; (rusks, boiled beets, potatoes), 

arid the convoy guards did not try to prevent their accepting 

such gifts,and the deprivees divided everything equally 

amongthelDSelves. (At every st¢p-custo~ not ours, ideology 

not ours.) Those deprivees who were especially fortunate got 

positions in their specialized· fields in· institutions (for example, 

Y:--v, on the railroad). They then received passes which permitted 

them to walk around the city (but they spent the night 

in camp). 

Here is how they fed them in a: camp in 1921: half a pound of 

bread (pl\lll another half-pound for those who fulfilled the norm), 

hot water for tea morning and evening, and, during the day, a 

ladle of gruel (with several dozen grains and some potato 

peelings in it). 

Camp life was embellished on the one hand by the denunciations 

of provocateurs (and arrests on the basis of the denunci~ . 

tions), and on the other by a dramatics and glee club. They gave 

concerts' for the people of· Ryazan in the hall of the former 

noblemen's assembly, and the deprivees' brass band played in the 

city park. The depriveeS got better and better acquainted with 

and more friendly with the inhabitants, and ,this became intolerable-and 

at that point they began to send the so-called "war 

prisoners" to the Northern Special Purpose Camps. 

The lesson of the instability and laxity in these concentration 

camps lay in their being surrounded by civilian life. And that 

was why the special northern camps were required. (Concentration 

camps were abolished in 1922.) 

This whole dawn of the camps deserves to have its spectrum 

examined much more closely. And glory to he who can-for all 

I have in my own hands is crumbs. 

..' 

At the end of the Civil War the two labor armies created by 

Trotsky had to be dissolved because of the grumbling of the soldiers 

kept in them. And by this token, the role of camps in the 

structure of the R.S.F.S.R. not only did not diminish but intensified. 

By the end of 1920 in the R.S.F.S.R. there were eighty-four


camps in forty-three provinces. 21 H one beli~ves the official statistics 

(even though classified), 25,336 persons and in addition 

24,400 ''prisoners of war of the Civil War" "were held in them 

at this time. 22 Both figures, particularly the second, seem to be 

understated. However, if one takes into consideration that by unloading 

prisons, sinking barges, and other types of mass annihilation 

thepgure had often begun with zero and been reduced to 

zero over and over, then perhaps these figures are accurate. " 

According to the same source, by October, 1923, at the beginning 

of the cloudless years of NEP (and quite a long time 

before the personality cult), there were being held: in 355 camps 

-68,297"persons deprived of freedom; in 207 reformatories- 

48,163; in 105 homes for confinement and prisons--16,765; in 

35 agricultural colonies-2,328, and another 1,041 minors and 

sick persons. 23 

And there is another expressive figure: on the overcrowding 

of camps (for the numbers of those imprisoned grew more swiftly 

than the organization of camps). For each one hundred accommodations 

for prisoners there were: in 1924-112 prisoners; in 

1925-120; in 1926-132; and in 1927-:-177. 24 Whoever has 

done time there knows well what camp life wasJike (in terms of ' 

places on bunks, bowls in the mess hall, or padded jackets )-if 

there were 1. 77 priso~ers for each allotted place. 

Year after year other forms of existence for prisoners were also 

tried, in a search for something better: for those who were not " 

dangerous and not poli~caly hostile ~ere were labor colonies, 

corrective-labor homes (from 1922), reformatories (from 1923), 

homes for confinement, labor homes (from 1924), labor homes 

for juvenile offenders; and,for politically hostile prisoners there 

were detention prisons (from 1922), and from 1923 on Special 

Purpose Isolators (the former "Centrals" and the future Special 

Purpose Prisons or TON's) . 

The creators of these forms saw in them a bold "struggle 

against making'"a fetish of prisons" common to all other countries 

"21. Tsenlralnyi Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Oktyabnkoi Revo!yutsii (Central 

State Archives of the October Revolution) (henceforth TsGAOR), collection 

393, shelf 13, file IB, sheet 111. 

22. Ibid., sheet 112. 

23. Ibid., shelf 39, iiIe 48, sheets 13, 14. 

24. A. A. Gertsenzon, Borba 8 Prutupnosttyll 11 RSFSR (Strllnle Against 

Crime in the R.s.F.s.R.), Moscow, JuridicalPnblisbing House, 1928; p. 103. 

22. I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

of the world, including the former Russia, where nobody could 

think up anything at all except prisons and more prisons. ("The 

Tsarist government, which had transformed the entire country 

into one enormous prison, had developed its prison system with 

some kind of particularly refined sadism.'~)21 

On the threshold of the "reconstruction period" (meaning 

from 1927) "the role of camps was growing [Now just what was 

one to think? Now after all the victories?]-against the most 

dangerous, hostile elements, wreckers, the kulaks, counterrevolutionary 

propaganda."i8 

And so it -was that the Archipelago was not about to disappear 

into the depths of the sea! The Archipelago would live! 

Until 1924 there were very few ordinary labor colonies in the 

Archipelago. In those years closed places of confinement were 

predominant, and they would n6t grow less later on. (In his re" 

pOrt of 1924 Krylenko demanded that the number of Special 

Purpose Isolators be increased-isolators for nonworkers and 

for especially dangerous persons among the workers (in which 

category, evidently, Krylenko himself would tum up later on). 

(This, his formulation, became a part of the Corrective Labor 

Code of 1924.) . 

Just as in the creation of every archipelago invisible shifts take 

place Somewhere in imPO!-1ant supporting strata before the pictUre 

of the world emerges before us--so here, too, very important 

shifts and changes in names took place which are now 

nearly incomprehensible to our minds. . 

. ~ At the very beginning there was primeval chaos, and places of 

imprisonment were' under the jurisdiction of three different institutions: 

the Cheka (Comrade Dzerzhinsky), the NKVD (Comrade 

Petrovsky), and the People's Commissariat of Justice (Comrade 

Kursky)'. Iri the NKVD at first there was GUMZak (the 

Chief Administration for Places of Iinprisonment, immediately 

after October, 1917); and. then GUPR (the Chief Administration 

for Forced Labor), arid then once again GUMZ. 2 T In the 

People's Commissariat of Justice there was the Prison Adminis 

·tration (December, 1917), then the Central Penal Department 

25. Vyshinsky, op. cit., p. 431. 

26. I. L. Averbakh, Ot Prestllplenlya k Trlldll(From Crime to Labor), 

edited by Vysbinsky, Soviet Legislation Publishers, 1936. 

27. Just as it is today, in the sixties.


(May, 1918) with a network of Provincial Penal Departments 

and even congresses of them (September, 1920), and this was 

then made to sound better as the Central Corrective Labor Department 

(1921). It goes without saying that such dispersal was 

to the disadvantage of the punitive-corrective business, and Dzer- - 

zhinsky sought the unification of administrations. And as it happened; 

at this point a little-noticed merging of the Cheka into 

the NKVD took place: after March 16, 1919, Dzerzhinsky became 

the Commissar of Internal Affairs as well. And by 1922, 

he had also succeeded in transferring all places of imprisonment 

from the People's Commissariat of Justice ,to himself in the 

NKVD (June 25, 1922).28 And thus GUMZ of the NKVD kept 

ever expanding. 

Parallelto this took place the reorganization of the camp guards. 

First these were the armies of the VOKhR (the Internal Guard 

Service of the Republic), and then VNUS (the Internal Service). 

And in 1919 they were merged into the Corps of the Cheka,29 

and Dzerzhinsky became the chairman of their Military Council 

as well. (Nonetheless, nonetheless, up until 1924 there were 

complaints about the numerous escapes, the low state of disci- 

. pline among the personnel 3 0-probably there wer:e drunkenness 

and carelessness-their only interest lay in getting their wages.) 

And it was only in June, 1924, that, by decree of VTsIK and 

the Council of People's Commissars, military discipline was introduced 

into the corps of convoy* guards and recruitment of 

them through the People's Commissariat for the Army and Navy 

was inaugurated. B1 

And furthermore, parallel to this, a Central Bureau of Dactyloscopic 

Registration and a Central Breeding Establishment 

for Service and Tracking Dogs were created in 1922. 

But at this same time GUMZak of the U.S.S.R. was renamed 

GUITU (Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Institutions) 

of the U.'S.S.R., and then was renamed again-GUITL of the 

OGPU (the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), 

and its chief simultaneously became the Chief of Convoy Troops 

of the U.S.S.R. 

28. The magazine Vlast Sovetov (The Power of the Soviets), 1923, No. 1- 

2, p. 57. , 

29. Ibid., 1919, No. II, pp. 6-7. 

30. TsGAOR, collection 393, shelf 47, file 89, sheet 11. 

31. Ibid., collection 393, shelf 53, file 141, sheets 1, 3, 4. 

24 I T.HE GULAG AlCHIPELA~O 

. And how much excitemc;nt there was! And how many of those 

stairs; offices, guards, passes, rubber stamps, seals, and signs there 

were! . 

And from GUITL, the son ofGUMZak, derived our OWJl. 

Gulag.

26 THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Chapter 2 

• 

The Archipelago 

Rises from the Sea 

/ 

On the White. Sea, where the nights' are white for half a year 

at a time, Bolshoi Solovetsky Island lifts its white churches from 

the water within the ring of its bouldered kremlin· walls, rustyred 

from the lichens which have struck root there--and the 

grayish-white Solovetsky seagulls hover continually over the 

kremlin and screech. 

"In al'~s brightness it i~ as if there were no sin present .... 

It is as if nature here had not yet maturea to the point of sin" is 

how the writer Prishvin perceived the Solovetsky Islands. 1 

Without us these isles rose from the sea; without us they acquired 

a couple of hundred lakes replete with fish; without our 

help they were settled by capercaillies,· hares, and deer, while 

foxes, wolves, and other beasts of prey never ever appeared 

there. 

The glaciers came and went, the granite boulders littered the 

shores of the lakes; the lakes froze during the Solovetsky winter 

I'. And to Prishvin only the monks themselves seemed sinful in the cont'eXt 

of Solovki. It was 1908, and in accordance with the liberal concepts of the 

times it was quite impossible to say an approving word about the clergy. And 

yet to us, who have survived the Arcbipelago, those monks certainly seem 

angels. Though having every opportunity of eating their bellies full, they, in 

tbe Golgotha·Crucifixion Monastery, permitted themselves fish, itself a fast 

dish, only on the great holidays. Despite the opportunity to sleep whenever 

they pleased, they kept vigil nights on end, and (in that same small monastery) 

day long, year long, and in perpetuity read the Psalter around the clock and 

prayed for all Orthodox Christians, living and dead. 

2S 

1. The Solovetsky kremlin 

2. The Herring Gates

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea I 27 

nights, the sea howled under the wind and was covered with an 

icy sludge and in places froze; the northern lights blazed across 

half the sky; and it grew bright once again and warm once again, 

and the fir trees grew and thickened, and the birds cackled and 

called, and the young deer trumpeted-and the planet circled 

through all world history, and kingdoms fell and rose, and here 

there were still no beasts of prey and no human being. 

Sometimes the men of Novgorod landed there and they 

counted the islands as belonging to their Obonez1)skaya "pyatina."· 

Karelians lived ~ere tQf? Half a hundred years after the 

BattIe of Kulikovo Field and half a thousand years before the 

GPU, the monks Savvaty and German crossed the· mother-ofpearl 

sea in a tiny boat and came to look on this island without a 

beast of prey as sacred. The Solovetsky Monastery began with 

them. After .that the cathedrals of the Assumption and of the 

Transfiguration arose (illustration No. I: a general view of the 

Solovetsky kremlin from the direction of Svyatoye [Holy] Lake), 

the Church of the Beheading on Sekirnaya Hill (illustration No. 

3), and another score of churches, and another score of bell 

towers, and the smaJler monasteries of Golgotha, the Trini~, 

Savvatyevsky, and Muksalmsky, and solitary retreats of hermits 

and aacetics in the remote locations. The labor of many went into 

the creation of all this---:.first of the monks themselves and subsequently 

of the peasants belonging to the monastery. The lakes 

- were joined by dozens of canals. Lake water was delivered to the 

monastery by wooden.pipes. And the most surprising thing of all 

was a dike at Muksalma (nineteenth century) made from 

"immovable" boulders somehow set in place on the sand spits. 

On Large and Small Muksalma fat herds began to ~ture. The 

monks loved to tend animals, both tame and wild. The Solovetsky 

land turned out to be not only holy but rich too, capable of feeding 

many thousands.! In the vegetable gardens they raised plump, 

firm, sweet white cabbages (the stalks were called "Solovetsky 

apples"). All their vegetables were their own. And all of them 

were of the best quality. And they had their own greenhouses for 

2. Specialists in the history of technology say that back in the sixteenth 

century Filipp-Kolychev (who had raised his voice against Ivan the Terrible> 

introduced a system of agricultural technology at Solovki that even three centuries 

later would have been respectable anywhere. 


flowers, where they even raised roses. They developed fisheries- 

catch from the "sea and from the "Metropolitan's fishponds" 

dammed off from the sea. In the course of centuries and decades 

they acquired their own mills to mill their own grain, their own 

sawmills, their own dishware made in their own pottery works, 

their own foundry, their own smithy, their own bindery, their 

own leather shop, their own carriage shop, and even their own 

electric power station. Even their elaborately shaped bricks and 

their seagoing boats for their own use-they made all themselves. 

However, no development ever took place in the past,-nor 

takes place in the present-and it isn't clear that" it will ever take 

place in the future-without being accompanied by military 

thought and prison thought. 

Military thought: It was impermissible for some sort of feck:; 

less mOJ)ks just to live on just an island~ The island was on the 

boJ¥lers of the Great Empire, ~nd, cpnsequently, it was required 

to • with the Swedes, the Danes, the English, and, conse- 

"" queatly, it was required to build a fortress with walls eight yards 

thick and to raise up eight towers on the walls, and to make narrow 

embrasures in them, and to provide" for a vigilant watch 

from the cathedral bell tower. 8 

~osirP thought: How glorious-good stone waIls standing on 

a separate island! What a good place to confine important 

criminals-and with someone already there to provide guard. 

We won't interfere with their saving their souls: just guard our 

prisoners!' 

Had SaVvaty thought about that when he landed on the holy 

island? 

They imprisoned" church heretics here and political heretics as 

well. For example, Avraami PaIitsyn was imprisoned here (he 

died here); and Pushkin's uncle, P. GannibaI-for his support 

of the Decembrists. And the last ataman of the Zaporozhe Cossacks, 

Kolnyshevsky (a distant predecessor of Petlyura?)-, when 

3. And the monastery did have to defend itself against the English in 1808 

and in 1854, and emerged unconquered; and in the conflict with the supporters 

of the Patriarch Nikon in 1667 the monk Feoktist opened a secret entrance 

and betrayed the Solovetsky kremlin to a boyar of the Tsar. 

4. How much of humanity's faith was desb:oyed by this double duty of 

" Christian monasteries as prisons!


~h was already a very old man, was imprisoned here, and he was 

over a hundred years old when he was released after serving a 

long term.' 

Incidentally, the ancient history of the Solovetsky monastery 

prison was the victim of a fashionable myth, disseminated only 

in Soviet times, during the period of the Soviet prison camp on 

Solovki, which deceived the writers of guidebooks and historical 

descriptions--and nowadays one can read in several books that 

the Solovetsky prison was a torture prison, that it had hooks for 

the rack, and lasl)es, and torture with fire. But all these'were the 

appurtenances of interrogation prisons in the era before Empress 

Elitabeth, or of the Western Inquisition, and were not at all 

typical of Russian monastery dungeons in general, and were 

dreamed up here by an unscrupulous and also ignorant in~ 

vestigator. 

The old Solovetsky Island people remember him very well. 

It was the joker Ivanov, who bore the camp nickname of the 

"antireligious germ." Formerly he had been a lay brother attached 

to the Novgorod Archbishopric, arrested for selling church 

valuables to the Swedes. He got to Solovki in 1925 and hustled 

about to escape general work and death. He had made antireligious 

propaganda among the prisoners his specialty, and of 

course became a collaborator of. the ISCh (the Information and 

Investigation Section-which was named very candidly!). But 

in addition he excited the heads of the camp with his suggestions 

that many treasures had been buried here by the monks-and 

so they created a Commission for Excavations under his leadership. 

This commission kept on digging many months. But, alas, 

the monks had cheated the pliychological calculations of the 

"4ntireligious germ": they had buried no treasures on Solovki. 

At this point, to get out of the situation with honor, Ivanov went 

around explaining the underground workshops, storehouse, and 

defense installations as prison and torture facilities. The torture 

instruments naturally could not be preserved so many centuries, 

5. The state prison in Solovki existed from 1718 on. Visiting Solovki in the 

eighties of the nineteenth century. the Commander of the Armies of the St. 

Petersburg Military District. Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, found the 

military garrison there superfluous and he removed all the soldiers from Solovki. 

In 1903 the Solovetsky prison ceased to exist. (A. S. Prugavin. Mo1UlStyrskiye 

Tyurmy [Monastery Prisons). Posrednik Publishers, pp. 78. 81.) 

30 I THE GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

but the hooks of course (for hanging up carcllsses) were evidence 

that there had been a rack here. It was more difficult to provide 

a basis for the finding that no trace of nineteenth-century torture 

had survived-so the conclusion was reached that "during the 

past century the regime in the Solovetsky prison had been significantly 

relaxed." The "discoveries" of the "antireligious germ" 

had come right at the most appropriate time, had in some degree 

reassured the disappointed administration .. and were published 

in The Solovetsky Islands and subsequently as a monograph in 

the Solovetsky printing shop-and by this means successfully 

muddied the waters of historical truth. (This whole intrigue was 

judged all'the more appropriate .because the flourishing Solovetsky 

Monastery had been very famous and respected in all Russia up 

to the time of the Revolution.) . 

But when power passed into the hanps of the workers, what 

was to be done' with these malevolent parasitical monks? They 

sent Commissars, socially tried-and-true leaders, and they proclaimed 

the monastery a state farm, and ordered the monks to 

. pray less and to work harder for the~nefit of the workers and 

peasants. The monks worked, and their herring, which was 

astonishing in its flavor, and which they had been able to catch 

because of their special knowledge of where and when to cast 

nets, was shipped off to Moscow to be used for the Kremlin tables. 

However, the abundance of valuables concentrated in the 

monastery, especialiy in the sacristy, troubled some of the leaders 

and overseers who had arrived there: instead of passing into the 

workers' hands (i.e., their own), these valuables lay there as a 

dead religious burden. And at that point, contradicting to it 

certain degree the Criminal Code but corresponding in a very 

genuine way.with the general spirit of expropriation of the 

property of nonworkers, the monastery was set on fire· (on May 

25, 1923); the buildings were damaged, and many valuables 

disappeared from the sacristy; and, the principal thing, all the 

inventory records burned up, and it was quite impossible to determine 

how much and exactly what had disappeared.o 

But without even conducting an investigation, what is our 

revolutionary sense. of justice (sense of smell) going to hint to 

6.- And the antireligiolls "germ" also referred to this fire, explaining the difficulty 

in finding nowadays material proofs of the former prison .cells and torture 

apparatus.


us? Who if not the black gang of monks themselves could have 

been to blame for the arson of the monastery wealth? So throw 

them out onto the mainland, and concentrate all the Northern 

Special Purpose Camps on the Solovetsky Islands! The eightyyear-old 

!Uld even hundred-year-old monks begged on their knees 

to be allowed to die on" the "holy soil," but they were all thrown 

out with proletarian ruthlessness except for the most necessary 

among them: the artels of fishermen;? the cattle specialists on 

Muksalma; Fa~er Methodius, the cabbage salter; Father Samson, 

the foundry specialist; yes, and other such useful fathers as 

well. (They"were allotted a comer of the kremlin separate from 

the camp, with their own exit-the Herring Gates [Illustration 

No.2]. They were christe~ed a Workers' Commune, but out of 

condescension for their total stupefaction they were left for their 

prayers the Onufriyev Church at the cemetery.) 

And that is how one of the favorite sayings constantly repeated 

by the prisoners came true: A holy place is never empty. The 

chimeS of bells fell silent, the icon lamps and the candle stands 

fell dark," the liturgies and the vespers resounded no longer; 

psalms were no longer chanted around the clock, the iconostases 

were wrecked (though they left the one in the Cathedral of the 

Transfiguration)-but on the other hand courageous Chekists, 

in overcoats with superlong flaps which reached all the way down 

to the heels, and particularly distinctive black SOlovetsky cuffs 

and lapels and black-edged service caps without-stars, arrived 

there in June, 1923, to set up a model camp, a model of severity, 

the pride of the workers' and peasants' Republic. 

Whatever Special Purpose might mean had not yet been 

formulated and set forth in instructions. But they had of course 

explained this orally at the Lubyanka to the chief of the" 

Solovetsky Camp, Eichmans. And he, on arriving at the islands 

himself, had explained it to his closest assistants . 

• 

Nowadays you could not astonish former zeks or even just 

plain people of the sixties with the story of Solovki. But just let 

7. lhey removed the fishermen from Solovki about 193O-and from that 

date" on, the herring catches came to an end: no one could manage to find " 

that particular herring in the sea any more, and it was as if it had completely 

disappeared. 

32 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. 

the reader imagine to himself, it he will, a person of Chekhov's 

and post-Chekhov Russia, a person of the Silver Age of our 

culture, as they called the decade after 1910, brought up then, 

a bit shaken up by the Civil War no doubt, but nonetheless ac 

-customed to the kind of food, clothing, and mutual verbal communication 

customary among human beingS'-and then and there 

he enters the gates of'Solovki-Kemperpunkt, the Kem Transit 

Camp.8 This transit camp in Kem was barren, without a tree or 

bush, PopOv Island, joined to the mainland by, a dike. And the 

first thing he would see in that naked, dirty pen wl;>uld be a 

quarantine company (for they organized the prisoners there in 

"companies"-they bad not yet discovered the "brigade") dressed 

in sacks. Just ordinary sacks: the legs. stuck out down below as 

if from under a skirt, and there were holes for head and arms 

(impossible to imagine something like that, but what is there that 

our Russian ingenuity cannot overcome'!). This sack the newcomer 

would avoid as long as he had his own clothes, but before 

he had even managed to examine those sacks well, he would see 

the legendary Captam Kurilko. 

Kurilko (or Beloborodov, interchangeable with him) also 

came out to the prisoner transport column in a long Chekist 

overcoat with those frightening black cuffs which looked so 

utterly outlandish against the background of the old Russian 

khaki-like a herald of death. He jumped up on a barrel or 

$ome other suitable elevation, and he spoke to the new arrivals 

with unexpectedly strident rage: ''Hey! Attention! -Here the republic 

is not So-viets-ka-ya but Solovets-ka-ya! Get this straight 

-no prosecutor has ever set foot on Solovetsky soil! And none 

ever willi Learn one thing! You have not been sent here for correction! 

You can't straighten out a hunchbackl The system here 

will be this: When I say, 'Stan!! up,' you stand up; when I say, 

'Lie down,' you lie down! Your letters home are going to read like 

this: rm alive, healthy, and satisfied with everything! Period!" 

Struck dumb with astonishment, famous noblemen, intellectuals 

from the capital, priests, mullahs, and dark Central 

Asians listened to him and heard such things as had never 

before been heard or seen or read. And Kurilko, who had never 

8. In Finnish tbis place is called Vegeraksba, i.e., ''The Habitation of 

:Witches."

~'!sesproc 


made.a splash during the Civil War, but who now, by this particular 

historical -method, was writing his name in the chronicle 

of all Russia, got more and more worked up by each successful 

shout and turn of phrase, and kept formulating and spontaneously 

sharpening up still other, new ones. 

And so, vainglorious and in full cry (and thinking maliciously 

inside himself: You prisoners, where were you hiding when we 

~ were fighting against the Bolsheviks? You thought you could sit 

the whole thing out in your nooks and crannies'! And now they've 

dragged you here! So that's for your shitty neutrality! And rm 

friends with the Bolsheviks, we are people of deeds!.), Kurilko 

would begin his exercises: . 

"Hello, First Quarantine Company! . . . That's bad, it's not 

loud enough, once more! Hello, First Quarantine Company! . . . 

That's not lOUd enough! . ; . You have got to shout 'Hello' so 

. loud that they can hear you over there on Solovki, across the bay! 

When two hundred men shout, the walls have got to fall down! 

Once again! Hello, First Quarantine Company!" 

Making sure that everyone was shouting at the top of his lungs 

and was ready to fall in his tracks, exhausted by shouting, Kurilko 

began his new exercise-:.the quarantine comP!lDy was to· run 

around a post: 

"Legs higher! Legs higher!" 

He was having hard going himself by now-like a tragedian 

before the final murder in the 1ifth act. And in the last hoarse 

croak of his half-hour of instruction, as a confession of the essence 

of Solovki, he promised those falling and those fallen, already 

prostrate on the ground: "rll make you suck the snot from 

. And that was just the first training session, intended to break 

. the will of the newly arrived prisoners. And in the black, wooden, 

rotten, stinking barracks they would be ordered "to sleep on their 

sides"-which wasn't so bad either, because that was for those 

prisoners whom the squad leaders would squeeze onto the bunks 

-for a bribe. And all the rest would stand between the bunks 

all night (and anyone guilty of an offense would be set to stand, 

furthermore, between the latrine barrel and the wall). 

And these were the blessed years of 1923 and 1925, before 

the great turning point, before the personality cult, before the 

34 I' THE GULAG ARCHIPEL.AGO 

distortions, before the violations. (And from 1927 on ther~ was 

this in addition-that urki, thieves, would already be lying there 

on the bunks and snapping the lice off themselves into the midst 

of the standing intellectuals.) 

While waiting for'the steamship Gleb Boky,D they worked at 

the Kern Transit Camp, and some of them might be compelled to 

run around the post hollering incessantly: ."I'm a sponger, I don't 

want to work, and I get in the way of others!" And ~ engineer 

who fell off the latrine barrel and spilled it on himself was not 

allowed in the barracks and was left outside to freeze in all his 

sewage. And sometimes the convoy would shout: "No laggards 

in the group! The convoy shoots without warning! Forward 

march!" And then, sliding the bolts of their rifles into position: 

"You trying to bug us?" And in the winter they would chase 

theJIl out on the ice on foot, forcing them to drag the boats behind 

them· and row across patches of water, and then in open 

water they would load them into the steamship'S hold and shove 

so many in that before getting to Solovki several of them would 

certainly die-without ever seeing the snowy-white monastery 

inside the brown walls. 

In his very first Solovetsky hours the newcomer might well 

-experience the Solovetsky reception bath trick: He has already 

undressed, and the first bath attendant dips a swab into a cask 

of green soap and swabs the newcomer; the second one boots him 

somewhere down below, down an inclined board or a flight of 

stairs; down there a third bath attendant lets him, still confused, 

have a whole bucketful; and a fourth right off shoves him out into 

the dressing room, where his "rags" have already been tossed 

down from above however they happen to land. (In this joke one 

can foresee all Gulag! Both its tempo and the price of a human 

being.) 

And that is how the newcomer swallowed the Solovetsky spirit! 

A spirit still unknown in the country as a whole, but which repre- 

9. Named in honor of the Chairman of the Moscow Troika of the OGPU, 

a young man who never finished his studies: 

"He was a student, he was a mining student, 

But passing marks· just never came." 

(This was a "friendly epigram" which appeared in the magazine Solovetskiye 

Ostrova, No. I, 1929. The censor was stupid, and he didn't understand what he 

had passed.)


sented the future spirit of the Archipelago created at Solovki. 

And here, too, the newcomer would see people in sacks; and 

also in ordinary "free" clothing, new on some and tattered on 

others; and in the special Solovetsky short. pea jackets made 

from coat material (this was a privilege; this was a sign of high 

position; that was. how the camp administrative personnel 

dressed), with the so-called "Solovchanki," caps made from the 

same kind of cloth; and suddenly you would see a person walking 

about among the prisoners in formal tail coat, and no one was 

surprised, no one turned around to look at him and laugh. 

(After all, everyone came wearing what was his own. This poor 

chap had been arrested in the Metropole Restaurant· and so 

there he was, slogging out his sentence in his tail coat.) 

The magazine The Solovetsky Islands (1930, No.1) declared 

it was the "dream of many prisoners" to receive standard clothing.lo 

Only the children's colony was completely dressed. And the 

women, for example, were given neither underwear nor stockings 

nor even kerchiefs to cover their heads. They had grabbed the 

old biddy in a summer dress; she just had to go on wearing it 

the whole Arctic winter. Because ·of this many prisoners- remained 

in their company quarters in nothing but their underwear, 

and no one chased them out to work. 

Government-issue clothing was so precious iliat no one on 

Solovki found the following scene either astonishing or weird: 

In the middle of winter a prisoner undressed and took his shoes 

off near the kremlin, then carefully handed in his uniform and 

ran naked for two hundred yards to anotherttgroup of people, 

where he was given clothes to put on. This meant that he was 

being transferred from the ~emlin administration to the administration 

of the Filimonovo Branch Railroadll-but if he had 

been transferred wearing clothes, those taking him over might 

10. An values turn upside down with the years, and what was considered a 

privilege in the Special Purpose Camp of the tw.enties-to wear governmenteu~si 

clothing-would become an annoyance in the Special Camp of the forties; 

there the privilege would be not to wear government-issue clothing, but 

to wear at least something of one's own, even just a cap. The reason here was 

not economic only but was a cry of the whole epoeh: one decade saw as its 

ideal how to join in the common lot, and the other how to get away from it. 

11. They had dragged the railroad from Staraya Russa to Novgorod all the 

waS' over here. 


not have returned the clotheS or have cheated by switching them. 

And here is another wjnter scene-the same. customs, though 

the reason is different. The Medical Section infirmary is found 

to be infectious, anel oiders'-are issued to scald it down and wash 

it (iJlt with boiling w~ter. But where are the sick prisoners to be 

putfu the meanwhile? All the kremlin accommodations are overcrowded, 

the density of the population of the Solovetsky Archipelago 

is greater than that of Belgium-so what must it be like 

in the Solovetsky kremlin? And therefore all the sick prisoners 

are carried out on blankets and laid out o~ the snow for three 

hours. When they have washed out the fufirmary, they haul the 

patients fu again. 

We have not forgotten, I.hope, that our newcomer is a child 

of the Silver Age? He knows nothing of the Second World War 

or of Buchenwald! What he sees is this: The squad leaders fu 

khaki pea jackets, stiffly erect, greet one another and the company 

leaders with salutes, and thin they drive their workers out 

with long clubs-with staves (and there is even a special verb, 

which everyone understands, meanfug "to stave"). He sees that 

sledges and carts are drawn not by horses but by men (several 

harnessed into one rig)-and there is· also another word, 

VRlDLO (an acronym meaning a ''Temporary Replacement 

for a Horse"). 

And from other Solovetsky inhabi~ts he learns thfugs more 

awful· than his eyes perceive. People pronounce the fatal word 

"Sekirka" to him. This means Sekirnaya Hill. Punishment cells 

were set up fu the two-story cathedral there. And here. is how 

they kept prisone~ fu the punishment cells: Poles the thickness 

of an arm were set from wall to wall and prisoners were ordered 

to sit on these poles all day. (At night they lay on the floor, one 

on·top of another, because it was overcrowded.) The height of 

the poles was set so that one's feet could not reach the ground. 

And it was not so easy to keep balance. In fact, the prisoner 

spent the entire day just tryfug to "maintain his p.erch. If he fell, 

the jailers jumped fu and beat .him. Or else they took him outside 

to a flight of stairs consisting of 365 steep steps (from the 

cathedral to the lake, j~stas the monks had built it) (lliustration 

No.4: the view up Sekirnaya Hill as. it is today). They tied the 

person lengthwise to a "balail" (a beam), for the added weight,


3. Church of the Beheading on Sekimaya Hill 

and rolled him down (and there wasn't even one landing, and 

the steps were so steep that the log with the human being on 

it would go all the way down without stoppirig). 

Well, after all, for poles you didn't have to go to Sekirka. They 

were right there in the kremlin punishment block, which was 

always overcrowded. Or they might put the prisoners on a sharpedged 

boulder on which one could not stay long either. Or, in 

summer, "on the stump," which meant naked among the 

mosquitoes. But in that event one had to keep an eye on the 

culprit; whereas if he was bound naked to a tree, the mosquitoes 

would look after things themselves. And then they could put 

whole companies out in the .snow for disobedience. Or they might 

drive a person into the marsh muck up to his neck and keep 

him there. And then there was another way: to hitch up a horse 

in empty shafts and fasten the culprit's legs to the shafts; then 

the guard mounted the horse and kept on driving the horse 

through a forest cut until the groans and the cries from behind 

simply came to an end. 

Before even beginning his . life on Solovki the novice was oppressed 

in his spirit ~imply by the fact of his endless three-year 

term. But the contemporary reader would be much too hasty if 

he concluded that this was an open and aboveboard system of 

destruction, of death camps! Oh, no, we are not so simple! In that 

first experimental camp, as in others afterward, and in the most 

comprehensive of them all, we never act openly. It is all mixed up, 

layer upon layer. And that is why it is so long-lasting and so 

successful. 

All of a sudden through the kremlin gates rode some daredevil 

astride a goat. He bore himself with importance and no· one 

laughed at him. Who was it and why was he on a goat? This 

was Degtyaryov. In the past he had been a cowboy.12 He had 

asked for a horse, but there were few horses op. Solovki, so they 

gave him a goat~ Whathad he done to deserve the honor? Because 

he had been a cowboy? No, not at all, because he was the 

manager of the Dendrological Nursery. He grew exotic trees. 

Here on Solovki. 

4. Steps up Sekimaya Hill 

12. Not to be confused with the free Degtyaryov, the Chief of Troops of the 

Soiovetsky Archipelago.


And so it was that from this horseman on a goat there arose a 

Solovetsky fantasy. Why should there be exotic trees on Solovki, 

where even the simple and reasonable vegetable economy of the 

monks had been destroyed, and where the vegetables were running 

out? Well, they were there because exotic trees at the 

Arctic Circle meant that Solovki, . like the entire Soviet Republic, 

was remaking the world and building a new life. But where did 

the seeds and the funds come from? That's exactly the point: 

there was money for seeds fOT the Dendrological·Nursery; there 

just wasn't any money for feeding the logging crews (where food 

was provided not according to norms but according to available 

funds) .. 

And as for archaeological excavations? Yes, we have a Commission 

for Excavations. It is important for us to know our past. 

In front of the ·camp administration building was a flowerbed. 

In it was outlined a friendly elephant-the acronym for 

"Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp" being SLON-"elephant." 

On the blanket on the elephant's back was the letter IOU" -standing 

for "Adminis~ration." And that very same rebUs was on the 

Solovetsky coupons which circulated as the currency of this 

northern state. What a pleasant, cozy little masquerade! So it 

would seem that everything was really very nice here, that that 

practical joker Kurilko had only been trying to throw a scare 

into us for nothing? And then, too, the camp had its own m3gazine-also 

called Slon. (The first numbers came out in 1924, 

typed, and from issue No. 9 on it was printed iIi the monastery 

printing shop.) From 1925 on The Solovetsky Islands had been 

published in two hundred copies, and had its own supplementthe 

newspaper Novyye Solovki (New Solovki). (We shall break 

with our accursed monastery past!) And from 1926 on subscriptions 

were accepted from the entire Soviet Union, and the 

run was a large one, and it was a big success. IS Censorship of the 

magaziDe was evidently superficial; the prisoners (according to 

Glubokovsky) wrote joking verses about the GPU Troika-and 

they were passed! And then they were sung from the stage of the 

13. And almost immediately it was broken off: the regime showed it was 

not in such a joking mood. In 1929, after the big events on Solovki and a general 

tum in all camps in the direction of re-education, the magazine was started 

up once again and appeared until 1932. 


Solovetsky theater right in front of Troika Chairman Gleb Boky 

himself: 

They promised us gifts-a .bag full 

Boky, Feldman, Vasilyev and Vult 

And this bigwig liked it! (Well, after all it was flattering! You 

hadn't even· finished school-and here you Were, going down in 

history.) Then the chorus: 

All those wllo rewarded us with Solovki, 

We do invite: Come take your leisure! 

Sit here with us for three or five- 

You'll always remember them with pleasure! 

They roared! They liked it! (Who was there to figur~ out that 

this was a prophecy?) 

.And impudent Shepchinsky, the son of a general who had 

been shot, then hung a slogan over the entrance.gates:' 

"SOLOVICI-FOR THE WORKERS AND PEASANTSI" 

(And this, too, was'a prophecy after alll But it didn't go over 

well: they figured this one out, and they took it down.) 

The actors of the dramatics troupe wore costumes made out of 

church vestments. They presented The Rails Hum. There :were 

affected foxtrotting couples on the stage (the dying West) 

and a victorious Red forge painted on the backdrop (Us). 

It was a fantastic world! No, that scoundrel Kurilko had just 

been joking! ' . , . 

And th~n there was also the Solovetsky Society for Local 

Lore, which published reports and researches. For instance,' 

about the unique sixteenth-century architecture or the Solovetsky 

fauna. And they wrote in such detail and with such scholarly 

devotion, with such . a gentle love· for their subject, that it really 

seemed as if these idle eccentric scholars had come to the island 

:becaUse oftbeir passion for knowledge, not as prisoners who 

had already passed through the Lubyanka and who were trembling 

lest they end up on Sekirnaya Hill, or out under mosquitoes, 

or fastened to the empty shafts behind a horse. Yes; the very 

Solovetsky beasts and birds, in keeping with the spirit of the 

students of local lore, had not yet died out, had not been shot or 

expelled, were not even frightened. Even as late as 1928 a whole 

trusting broOd . of hares would come right, lJp to the very edge 

of the road arid watch with curiosity the prisoners being led off 

to Anzer.

42 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE-LAGO 

5. The bell tower 

6. Door under the bell tower arch 

How had it happened that the hares had not been exterminated? 

They would explain it to the newcomer this way: The little 

beasts and birds are not afraid here, because there is a GPU 

order in effect: "Save ammunition! Not a single shot is to be 

fired, except at-a prisonerf' 

So all the scares were just a joke! But a shout comes in broad 

daylight in the kremlin yard where prisoners are crowded as thick 

as on Nevsky Prospekt: "Make way! Make way!" And three 

foppish young men with the faces of junkies (the lead man 

drives back the crowd 'of prisoners not with a club -but with a 

riding crop) drag along swiftly by the shoulders a prisoner with 

limp anns and legs dressed only.in his underwear. His face is 

horrible-flowing like liquid! They drag him off beneath the bell 

tower (Illustrations Nos. 5 and 6: right there beneath the arch 

and through that low door-it is set into the bell tower found a- 

. tions). They squeeze him through that little door and shoot him 

in the back of the head-steep stairs lead down inside, and he 

tumbles down them, and they can pile up as many as seven or 

eight men in there, and then send men to drag out the corpses 

and detail women (mothers and wives of men who have emigrated 

to Constantinople and religious believers who refuse to recant 

their faith and to allow their children to be torn from it) to wash 

down the steps.14 

But why like this? Couldn't they have done it at nightquietly? 

But why do it quietly? In th~t case a bullet would be 

wasted. In th~. daytime crowd _the bullet had an educational 

function. It, so to speak, s~ruck down ten with one shot. 

They shot them in a different way too-right at the Onufriyev 

cemetery, behind the wOlllt}n's barracks (the former gue~t house 

, for women pilgrims). And in fact that road past the women's 

barracks was christened f!xecution road. In winter one could see 

a man being led barefoot along it, in only his underwear, through 

the snow (no, it was not for torture! it was just so his footgear 

and clothes should not go to waste), his hands bound behind 

his back with wire,15 and the condemned man would bear himself 

14. And right now, there on the stones over which they dragged them, in 

that part of the courtyard secluded from the Solovetsky wind, cheerful tourists, 

who have come to seethe notorious -islands, sock a volleyball hours at a time. 

They do not know. Well, and if -they did know? They would go on socking 

anyway. 

15. A Solovetsky method which, strangely, was repeated with the corpses 

at Katyn Forest. Someone remembered-a matter perhaps of tradition? Or 

was it personal experience?

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea 43 

proudly and erectly, and with his. Iipsalone, without the help of 

his hands, smoke the last cigarette of his. life. (This was how you 

recognized an officer. After all, these were men who had gone 

through seven years on different fronts. There was an eighteenyear-old 

youth, the son of the historian V. A. Potto, who, when 

he was asked his profession by a work assigner,· replied with 

a shrug of the shoulders: "Machine gunner." Because of his 

youth, in the heat of the Civil War, he had never managed 

to acquire any other.) - 

A fantastic world! And that's the way it is sometimes. Much in 

history repeats itself, but there aIsd exist completely unique combinations, 

brief in duration, and limited in place. One such 

example was our New Economic Policy-the NEP: And another 

was early Solovki. 

There weren't many Chekists there at all (yes; and those who 

were may well have been in semipunishment status); no more 

than twenty to forty people held sway over thousands, many 

thousands. (At the very beginning they hadn't expected so many, 

but Moscow kept sending and sending and sending. In the first 

half-year, by December, 1923, there were already two thousand 

prisoners- gathered there. And in 1928 in the 13th Compa~y 

alone-the general-work company-the last in formation on 

count-oif would announce: "The 376th! Ten in the -unit!"-And 

what that added up to was 3,760 men, and the 12th Company 

was just as large, and the ~ 7th-which dug mass graves in the 

cemetery-was even bigger. And in addition to the kremlin com- . 

panies there were already others in "kommandirovki"-'"teM 

porary work parties: Savvatiyevo, Filimonovo, Muksalma, 

Trinity, and "Zaichiki"-the Zayatsky Islands.) By 1928 there 

were altogether about sixty thousand. And how many among 

them were "machine gunners," veteran soldiers with long service 

records? And in 1926 the inveterate habitual-criminal elements 

of all sorts began to flood in. And how were tlJey all to 

be kept in check, kept from rebelling? 

Only by te"orl Only with Sekirnaya Hill! With poles! With 

mosquitoes! By being dragged through stumps! By daytime _ executions! 

Moscow kept pushing out prisoner transports without 

taking into consideration local forces-but neither did Moscow 

set limitations on its Chekists by hypocri~ rules: everything 

done to maintain order was a fait accomlllt, lUld it was really 

true that no prosecutor would set foot on SOiOvets1ty soil. 


And the second metbo.d was\ a gauze veil with a fringe: the 

era of equality-and New Solovki! Self-guarding by the prisonersl 

Self-supervision! Self-verification! Company commanders, 

. platoon commanders, squad leaders-all from among the prisoners 

themselves. And their own amateur stage shows and their 

own self-amusement! 

And beneath this terror and this fringe what kind of people 

were there? Who? Genuine aristocrats. Career military ·men. 

Philosophers. Scholars. Painters. Actors. Lyceum graduates. 10 

Because of their upbringing, their traditions, tI!ey were too proud 

to show depression or fear, to whine and complain about their 

fate even to friends. It was a sign of good "manners to take everything 

with a smile, even while being marched out tol,e shot. Just 

as if all this Arctic prison in a roaring sea were simply a minor 

misunderstanding at a picnic. To joke. To make fun of the jailers. 

So there was an elephant on the money and in the flowerbed. 

So there was a goat in place of a horse. 

And if the 7th Company was made up of actors, then its company 

leader had to be Kunst. And if there was a person named 

Berry-Yagoda, * then he, of course, had to be the chief of the 

berry-drier. And that is how those jokes came about which got 

past the ignoramus censors of the magazine. And those songs. 

Georgi Mikhailovich Osorgin used to walk around and mock: 

"Comment vous portez-vous on this island?" "A lager comme a 

lager." 

(And these jokes, this stressed and emphasized independence 

of the aristocratic spirit-these more than anything else irritated 

the ha1~-beast Solovetsky jailers. One.time Osorgin was scheduled 

16. Here are a few of the Solovki veterans whose names have been preserved 

in the memoirs of those who survived: Shirinskaya-8hakhmatova, Sheremeteva, 

Shakhovskaya, Fillstum, I. S. Delvig, Bagratuni, Assotsiani-Erisov, 

Gosheron de la Foss, Sivers, G. M. Osorgin, Klodt, N. N. Bakht'ushin, Aksakov, 

I(:omarovsky. P. M. Voyeikov, Vadbolsky, Vonlyarlyarsky, V. Levashov, 

O. V. Volkov, V. Lozino-Lozinsky, D. Gudovich, Taube, V. S. Muromtsev, 

_ former Cadet leader Nekrasov (was it he?), the financier Professor Ozerov, 

the jurist Professor A. B. Boradin, the psychologist Professor A. P. Sukhanov, 

the philosophers Professor A. A. Meiyer, Professor S. A. Askoldov, Y. N. Danzas, 

the theosophist Myobus. The historians N. P. Antsiferov, M. D. Priseikov, 

G. O. Gordon, A. I. Zaozersky, P. G. Vuiyenko. The literary scholars D. S. 

Likhachev, Tseit1in, the linguist I. Y. Anichkov, the Orienta1ist N. V. Pigulevskaya, 

the ornithologist G. Polyakov, the artists Braz and P."F. Smotritsky, the 

actors I. D. Kalugin (of the A1eksandrinka), B. Glubokovsky, V. Y. Koralenko 

(a nephew). In the thirties, near the end of Solovki, Father Pavel A. 

Plorensky was also there. "


to be shot. And that very day his young wife [and he himself 

was not yet forty] disembarked on the wharf there. And Osorgin 

begged the jailers not to spoil his wife's visit for her. He promised 

that he would not let her stay more than three days and that they 

could shoot him as soon as she left. And here is the kind of 

self-control this meant, the sort of thing we have forgotten 

because of the anathema we have heaped upon the aristocracy, 

we who whine at every petty misfortune and every petty pain: 

For three days he never left his wife's side, and he had to keep 

her from guesSing "the situation! He must not hint at it even in 

one single phrase! He must not allow his spirits to quaver. He 

must not allow his eyes to darken. Just once [his wife is alive and 

she remembers it now], when they were walking along the Holy 

Lake, she turned and saw that her husband had clutched his head 

in torment. "What's 'wrong?" "Nothing," he answered instantly. 

She could have stayed still longer, but be begged her to leave. 

As the steamer pulled away from the wllarf, he was already 

undressing to be shot.) - 

But still someone did give them those three days. Those thi'ee 

Osorgin days, like other cases, show how far the Solovetsky 

regime was from having donned the armor of a system. The impression 

is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme 

cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this 

was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the 

embryo of the ~t Archipelago and which were destined to dry 

up and wither in the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people 

did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens 

of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that 

its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were 

ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!) 

People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison 

terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a 

ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most 

of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse 

trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let 

go, and pin down again and let go again. And that patriarchal 

failure to understand where everything was heading could not 

have" failed entirely to influence the guards from among the 

prisoners also, .and perhaps in a minor way the prison ~epers 

themselves. . 


No matter how clear-cut the declarations of the class teaching, 

openly displayed and proclaimed everywhere, that the sole- fate 

the enemy deserves is annihilation-still, it was impossible to 

picture to oneself the annihilation of each concrete two-legged 

individual possessing hair, eyes, a mouth, a neck and shoulders. 

One could actually believe that classes were being destroyed, but 

the people who constituted these classes should be left, shouldn't 

they? The eyes of Russians who had been brought up in other 

generous and vague concep~, like eyes seeing through badly 

prescribed eyeglasses, could in no wise read with exactitude the 

phrases of the cruel teaching. Not long before, apparently, there 

had been months and years of openly proclaimed terror.:.....yet it 

was still impossible to believe! 

Here, too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the 

instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when 

things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. 

Was -everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were 

things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still 

believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a 

few prophets of gloom who had already figured things' out and 

who knew when and how all this would be smashed into 

smithereens. 

The cUp'ola had been damaged by fire-but the masonry was 

eternal .... The land cultivated on the very edge of the earth ... 

had now been laid waste. The color of the restless sea was 

changeable. The lakes still. The animals trusting. The -people 

merciless. And the albatrosses flew to the Bay of Biscay to spend 

the winter with all the secrets of the first island of the Archipelago. 

But they would not tell their secrets on the carefree beaches . . . 

but they would tell no one in Europe. 

A fantastic world. And one of the main short-lived fantasies 

. was this: camp life was run by ... White Guards! So Kurilko 

was . . . not a chance phenomenon. 

Here is how i~ worked. In the whole kremlin the only free 

Chekist was the camp duty officer. Guarding the gates (there were 

no watchtowers) and patrOlling the islands and catching escapees 

were up to the guard. Other than free people, they recruited into 

the guard ordinary murderers, counterfeiters, and other habitual 

criminals (but not the thieves). But who was there. to take charge 

of the whole internal organization, who was to run the Admini-


strative Section, and who were to be the company and squad 

commanders? Not, certainly" the priests, nor the sectarian 

prisoners, nor the NEPmen, nor the scholars, ~or the students. 

(There were no few students there, too, but a student's cap on 

the head of a Solovetsky prisoner was considered a challenge, an 

impudence, a black mark, and an application to get shot.) It 

was former military men who could do -this best. And what 

military people were there other than the White officers? 

And thus, without any special deal and hardly as the result 

of any well-thought-out plan, the Solovetsky cooperation of the 

Chekists and the White Guards began! . 

Where were the principles of either? It is surprising? Astonishing? 

Only to someone used to social analysis on a class basis and 

unable to see differently. But to such an analyst everything in the 

whole world is bound to be astonishing, because the world and 

human beings never fit into his previously set grooves. 

And the Solovetsky prison keepers would have taken the devil 

himself into their service, given that they had not been given 

"Red" personnel. It had been - decreed: the prisoners should 

supervise themselves (in other words, oppress themselves). And 

who was there to whom this could better have been entrusted? 

And as for the eternal officers, the "military breed," how could 

they forgo taking into their own hands at least the organization 

of camp life -(camp oppression)? Just how could they stand aside 

submissively, watching someone else take charge incapably and 

mess everything up? We have already discussed earlier in this 

book the subject of what shoulder boards do to the human heart. 

(And just bide your time. The day will come when the Red 

commanding officers will be arrested too-and -how they will 

fight for jobs in the camp guards, how they will long to get hold 

of a turnkey's pile, just so as to be trusted again! I have already 

said that if Malyuta Skuratov had just summoned us ... ) Well, 

and the White Guards must have felt much the same: All right, 

we're lost anyway, and everything is lost, so what difference does 

it make, why not! Then too: "The worse, the better"-we'Il help 

you make a hellqole out of Solovki, of a kind that never ever 

existed in our Russia, and your reputation will be all the worse. 

And then: All the rest of our boys agreed, so what am I supposed 

to do-sit in the warehouse as a bookkeeper like a priest? 

Nonetheless, the most fantastic Solovetsky story was not just 

/' 


that alone but the fact that, having taken over the Administrative 

Section, the White Guards began to put up a fight against the 

Chekists! It's your camp on the o.utside, so to say, and ours on 

the inside. And it was the business of the Administrative Section 

to decide who worked where and who would be sent where. We 

don't meddle outside, so don't you meddle inside! 

Not very likely, that! For after all, the Information and Investigation' 

Section-the ISCh-had to have the whole inside 

of the camp speckled with its stoolies! This was the primary and 

the dreaded power in camp-the ISCh. (And the security officers 

were also recruited from among the prisonerS-the crowDing' 

glory of prisonClr self-supervis!on!) And that was what the White 

Guard Administrative Section-the ACh-took upon itself to 

do battle with! All the other sections-the Cultural and Educational 

Section and the Medical Section, which would have such 

great significance in future camps-were both frail and pitiful 

here. And the Economic Section, headed by N. Frenkel, was 

also merely vegetating. It engaged in "trade" with the outside 

world and ran the nonexistent "industry"; the paths of its future 

grandeur had not yet been plotted. So it was the two powers, the 

ISCh and th~ ACh, that fought it out. It began right at the Kem 

Transit Camp: The newly arrived poet A. Yaroslavsky approached 

the squad cOIJlJl}ander and whispered something in his 

ear. The sqUad commander bellowed out his words with military 

precision: "You were secret-so now you're public!' 

The ISCh had its Sekirka, its punishment blocks, its denunciations, 

its perSonal case files on the prisoners, and had control of 

liberating prisoners ahead of time and executions .. It also was in 

charge of ~nsoring letters and parcels. And the ACh controlled 

work parties, reassignment from island to island, and prisoner 

transports. . 

The ACh exposed the ISCh stoolies in order to send them off 

on prisoner transports. The stoolies were pursued and Bet! and 

hid in ISCh headquarters-but they were pursued even there, 

and the ISCh rooms were broken into and the stoolies dragged 

out and hauled off to prisener transports. lT 

(They were dispatched to Kondostrov, to logging camps. And 

there the fantastic story went right on. In Kondostrov the exposed 

17. It is interesting that the dawn of the Archipelago thus began with the 

very same pbenomenon to which the later Special Camps returned: with a 

blow struck at the stoolies.


and ruined stoolies published a wall newspaper entitled Stukach' 

[Stoolie], and in it, with sad humor .. they further "exposed" in 

each other such sins as "beingoverpampered" and the like.) 

At this point the heads of ISCh brought charges against the 

eager beavers of the ACh, lengthened their. terms, and sent them 

to Sekirka. But the ISCh defense was complicated by the fact that 

an exposed informer, in the interpretation of those years, was 

considered a criminal. (Article 121 of the Criminal Code: "disclosure 

. . . by an official personage of information not to be 

disclosed"-quite independently of whether disclosure took place 

intentionally or not and in what degree the individual was actually 

an official personage.) Consequently, exposed informers could 

not be defended and saved by the ISCh. Once caught they had 

only themselves to blame. Kondostrov was almost legitimized. 

The height of the "hostilities" between the ISCh and the ACh 

came in 1927 when the White Guards broke into the ISCh, 

cracked the sate, seized and published the c~plete lists of stoolies 

-who thereby became hopeless criminals! .After that, however, 

the ACh steadily declined: there were ever fewer former officers, 

and the percentage of criminals continually rose (for example, 

the "chubarovtsy"-as a result of the notori~us Leningrad thugs 

trial) .. And gradually the Administrative Section was subdued. 

Yes, and then in the thirties a new camp era began, when 

Solovki even ceased to be Sol~vki-arid became a mere run-ofthe-mill 

"Corrective Labor Camp.'" And the black star of the 

ideOlogist of that new era, Naftaly Frenkel, rose in the heavens 

while his formula became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 

"We have to squeeze everything out of a priSoner in the first 

three months-after that we don't need him any more." 

• 

But where are Savvaty and German and Zosima? Who was it 

who thought of living below the Arctic Circle, where cattle can't 

be bred and fish can't be caught and breadgrains and vegetables 

don't grow? ' 

Oh, you experts at ruining flourishing lands! So soon-in one 

year or two-to reduce the mOdel agricultural enterprise of the 

monks to total and irreversible decline!' How was it done? Did 

they plunder it and send away the plunder? Or did they destroy 

it all right there on the spot? And to be incapable of extracting 

7. The Chapel of German 

8. Preobrazhensky Cathedral: entrance 

9. Preobrazhensky Cathedral (Church of the Transfiguration)

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea I s~ 

anything from the good earth while possessing thousands of 

unoccupied hands! 

Only the free people there had milk, sour cream, and fresh 

meat, yes, and the excellent cabbage of Father Methodius. And 

for prisoners there was rotten cod, salted or dried; a thin gruel 

with pearl barley or millet grits and without potatoes. And there 

was never either cabbage soup or borscht. And as a result there 

was scurvy, and even "the office workers' companies" all had 

boils, and as for those on general work, their situation can be 

imagined. Prisoner transports returned "on aU fours" from distant 

work parties-they actually crawled from the wharf on hands 

and knees. 

The prisoners were allowed to use up nine rubles a month out 

of money orders from hom~d there was a prison commissary 

in the Chapel of German (Illustration No, 7). And one parcel 

a month could be received, which was opened and inspGCted in 

. the ISCh, and if you didn't bribe them, they would announce that 

much of what had been sent you was prohibited-grits,.for example. 

In the Nikolskaya Church and in the Uspensky Cathedral 

the bunks rose-four tiers high. Nor was the 13th Company any 

less crowded in the block attached to the Preobrazhensky Cathedral 

(Illustration No.9). Imagine the crowded mass of prisoners 

at that entrance. (Illustration No.8): 3,500 stampeding back 

to quarters on returning frOin wox:k. It took an hour's wait in line 

to get hot water at the boilers. On Saturdays the evening roll calls 

dragged out till very, very late at night (like the former religious 

services). They were very particular about hygiene, of course: 

prisoners were forced to have heads clipped and beards shaved 

off (also all priests----one after another). In addition, they cut 

all the flaps off long clothing (particularly cassocks, of course), 

for they were a principal point of infection. (The Cheldsts had 

greatcoats which reached right down to the ground.) True, in the 

winter the ill and the aged sitting there in underwear and sacks 

could not make it to the baths from the company bunks. They 

were done in by the lice. (They hid the corpses under the bunks 

so as to get the extra rations----even though that was not very 

advantageous for the living: the lice crawled from the cold corpses 

onto the warm living survivors.) In the kremlin there was a bad 

Medical SectiOl\ with a bad hospital, and in the remoter parts of 

Solovki there was no medicine at all. 

52 I THE· GULAG ARC.HIPELAGO 

(The sole exception was .the Golgotha-Crucifixion Monastery 

on Anzer, a penalty work party, where they cured patients ... by 

murdering them. There in the Golgotha Church prisoners lay . 

dying from lack of food and from cruelty, enfeebled priests next 

to syphilitics, and aged invalids next to young .thieves~ At the 

request of the dying, and in order to ease his own problem, the 

Golgotha doctor gave terminal cases strychnine; and in the winter 

the bearded corpses in their underwear were kept in the church 

for a long time. Then they were put in the vestibule, stacked 

standing up since that way they took up less space. And when 

they carried them out, they gave them a shove and let them roll 

on down Golg9tha Hill.1S) 

At one time-in 1928-a typhus epidemic broke out in Kem. 

And 60 ·percent of those there died, but the typhus crossed to 

Bolshoi SOlovetsky Island as well, and hundreds of typhus patients 

lay about in the unheated "theatrical" fiall all at the same time. 

And hundreds likewise left there ·for the cemetery. (So as not to 

confuse the count, the work assigners wrote the last name of every 

prisoner on his wrist, and some of those who recovered switched 

terms with shorter-term cadavers by rewriting the corpses' names 

on their own hands.) And when many thousands of the Central 

Asian "Basmachi" rebels were herded here in 1929, they brought 

wIth them an epidemic characterized by black spots on the body, 

and all who fell ill with it died. It could not, of course, be the 

plague or smallpox, as Solovki people imagined it was, because 

. those two diseases had already been totally wiped out in the 

Soviet Republic. And so they called the illness "Asiatic typhus." 

They didn't know ~ow to cure it, and here is how they got rid of 

it: If one pri~oner in a cell caught it, they jlist locked the cell and 

let no one out, and passed them food only through the door-till 

they all died. . 

What a scientific discovery it would be for us to establish that 

18. This is an unusual name for a church and monastery, not encountered 

anywhere else. According to legend (a manuscript of the eighteenth century 

in the Slate Public Library, dSolovetsky Paterik" r'The Lives of the Solovetsky 

Fathers"]), on June 18, 1712, the monk-priest Job during an all-night prayer 

vigil at the foot of this hill saw a vision of the Mother of God "in all the glory 

of heaven"-and she said to him: ''This 11i11 from henceforth shall be called 

Golgotha, and on it shall be built a church and a I!lonastery of the Crucifi,gon. 

And it will be whitened by the sufferings of count1ess multitudes." That is what 

they named it, and they built it there, but fQr more than two hundred years 

the prophecy was an empty one; and it did not seem likely that it would ever 

come true. But after the Solovetsky camp one cOuld no longer say this.

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea 

I S3 

in Solovki the Archipelago had not yet arrived at an understanding 

of itself, that the child had not yet guessed its o~ character! And 

then to observe how this character"gradually manifested itself. 

Alas, it didn't work out that way! Even though there was no one 

. to learn from, even though there was no one from whom to take 

an example, and even though it would seem _ that there was no 

hereditary element, nonetheless the Archipelago swiftly discover.ed 

and manifested its "future character. 

So much future experience had already been discovered at 

Solovki. The phrase "to extricate from general work" had already 

come into existence. All slept on board bunks, but there were 

nevertheless some who had individual cots. There were whole 

companies in the church, but some prisoners were crowded twenty 

to a room,· and there were other rooms, with only four or five. 

There were already some who knew their rights: to inspect the 

women's prisoner transports and pick out a woman. (There were 

only 150 to 200 women for thousands of men, but later on there 

were more.) A struggle for the soft cushy spots through bootlicking 

and betrayal was already going on. They had already removed 

all the Kontriki-"Counter-Revolutionaries"-from office positions, 

to which they were then restored because the habitual crimi- 

, na1s only messed everything up. The camp air was already thick 

with continual ominous rumors. The supreme law of conduct had 

already become:' Trust no one! (And this squeezed and froze out 

the spiritual grace of the Silver Age.) 

The free persons, too, had begun to enter into the sweetness 

of camp life and to taste its joys: Free families received the rigbp 

to have the free services of cooks from the camp. They coild 

always demand the services of woodcutters, laundresses, seiunstresses, 

and barbers. Eichmans built himself an' Arctic villa. 

Potemkin, too, a former sergeant major of the dragoons, subsequently 

a Communist, a Chekist, and then the chief of Kern 

Transit Camp, lived lavishly. He opened a restaurant in Kem. 

His orchestra was recruited from Conservatory musicians. His 

waitresses wore silk dresses. Gulag comrades who arrived from 

rationed Moscow could feast and frolic in luxury here at the 

beginning' of the thirties. They were served at table by Princess 

Shakhovskaya and their check was only a formality, amounting 

to something like thirty kopecks, the rest being at the camp's 

expense. 

Yes, and the Solovetsky kremlin-this was not the· whole 

S4 

I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Solovki. It was the most privileged place in camp. The real Solovki 

was not even in the monasteries (where, after the socialists were 

sent away, work parties were established). The real Solovki was 

in the logging operations, at the remote work sites. But it is precisely 

those distant backwoods that are most difficult to learn 

about nowadays, because those people did not survive. It is known 

that even at that time'they did not allow the workers to dry themselves 

out in the autumn, that in whiter they did not provide them 

with clothes or footgear in the deep snow, and that the length of 

the workday was determined by the work norm: the workday was 

completed when the work norm had been executed, and if it 

wasn't, there was no return to shelter until it was. And at that 

time, too, they "discovered" the device of new work parties which 

consisted of sending several hundred people to totally unprepared, 

uninhabited places. 

But it would seem that in the first years of Solovki both slavedriving 

the workers and allotting back-breaking work norms took 

the form of periodic outbursts, transitory anger; they had not 

become a viselike system. The economy of the whole country 

was not based on them, and the Five-Year Plans had not been 

instituted. In the first years of SLON there was evidently no firm 

external economic plan. Yes, and for that matter there was no 

very careful calculation of how many man-days went into work 

for the camp as a whole. This was why they could suddenly switch 

with such frivolity from meaningful productive work to punishment: 

pouring water from one ice hole into another, dragging 

logs from one place to another and back. There was cruelty in 

this, yes, but there was also a patriarchical attitude. When slavedriving 

became a thought-out system, pouring water over a prisoner 

. in subzero temperatures or putting the prisoner out on a 

stump to be devoured by mosquitoes had turned into a superfluity 

and a useless expenditure of the executioners' energy. 

There is an official figure: up to 1929 in the R.S.F.S.R.~ 

the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union-"only 34 to 41 percent 

of an prisoners were engaged in work."lB (And how could it 

have been any different, in view of the fact that there was unemployment 

in the country at the time?) It is not clear whether work 

at servicing and maintaining the camp itself was. included in this 

19. Vyshinsky, op. cit., p. I1S.


ISS 

or whether it was only "external" work. At any rate, work at 

servicing and maintaining the camp itself would not have been 

enough to occupy all the remaining 60 to 65 percent of the camp 

prisoners. This proportion found its expression at Solovki as well. 

Clearly throughout the twenties there were no few prisoners without 

permanent work (partly because of -the lack of anything to 

wear outdoors) or else performing purely formal duties. 

That first year of the First Five-Year Plan, which shook up the 

entire country"shook up Solovki as well. The new Chief of SLON, 

appointed in 1930, Nogtev (the same Chief of the Savvatyevsky 

Monastery who had shot down the socialists), reported, to the 

accompaniment of a "whisper of astonishment in an astounded 

hall," to the free inhabitants of the city of Kem, these figures: 

"Not counting its logging operations for its own use, which had 

grown at quite exceptional tempos," USLON had filled "external" 

orders alone for the Railroad Timber Trust and the Karelian 

Timber Trust: in 1926-63,000 rubles; in 1929-2,355,000 

rubles (thirty-seven times greater!); and in 1930, the total had 

jumped another three times .. Road construction for the KareIian 

Murmansk rt:g!on had been carried out in 1926 in the amount of 

105,000 rubles, and, in 1930, six million-increased by fi#yseven 

times!20 

And that is how the once remote Solovki, where they didn't 

know how to make full use of the prisoners, came to an end. The· 

miracle-worker work rushed in to assist. 

Solovki was created via Kem Transit Camp. And via Kem 

Transit Camp Solovki, in its maturity, began, at the end of tb.e 

twenties, to spread back to the mainland. And the worst thing 

that could now befall a prisoner was to be sent ol!t on .these work 

parties on the mainland; Previo~y the sole lhainland points 

belonging to Solovki were Soroka .and Sumsky Posad--coastal 

appurtenances of the monasteries. But now th~,a.


I S'J 

postponed till summer?) "The task seemed insuperable-400,OOO 

cubic yards of excavations .... " (North of the Arctic Circle! In . 

the middle of winter! And they called it earth? It was harder than 

any granite!) " ... performed solely by hand-with pick, crowbar 

and spade." (And did they at least have mittens?) ''The work was 

delayed by the need for a multitude of bridges. WOrk went on for 

twenty-four hours.a day in three shifts, and the Arctic night was 

sliced by the light of incandescent kerosene lanterns as clearings 

were cut through the pine woods and stumps were dug out, in the 

midst of snowstorms which covered the roadbed deeper than the 

height of a man. "!Ill 

Now go back and read that over. Then ,close your eyes and 

picture the scene: Ypu are a helpless city dweller, a person who 

sighs and pines like a character in Chekhov. And the~e you are in 

that icy hell! Or you are a Turkmenian in your embroidered skullruoy~ac 

"tyubeteika"-out there in that night blizzard! Digging 

out stumps! 

This was in those best and brightest twenties, before any "personality 

cult," when the white, yellow,. black, and brown races 

of the Earth looked upon our country as the torchbearer of n-eedom: 

23 This was during those selfsame years when they used to 

sing amusing ditties about Solovki from the nation's vaudeville 

stages. 

And so, imperceptibly-via. work parties-the former CODcept 

of the Special Purpose Camp, totally isolated on its 

islands, di~olved. And the Archipelago, born and come to maturity 

on Solovki, began its malignant advance through the nation. 

A problem arose: The territory of this country had to be spread 

out iii front of the Archipelago-but without allowing the Archipelago 

to conquer it, to distract ~t, to take it ~ver or assimilate it 

to itself. Every little island and every little hillock of the Archipelago 

had to be encircled by a hostile, stormy Soviet seascape. 

It was permissible for the two worlds to interlock in separate strata 

-but not to intermingle! 

And this Nogtev ~port which evoked a ''whisper of astonish- 

22. G. Fridnian, ''Skazochnaya Byl" ("A Fairy Tale"), Solovetskiye Ostrova, 

1930, No.4, pp. 4~. . 

23. Oh, Bertrand Russelll Ob, Hewlett 1ohnsonl Where, oh where, was 

your flaming ClJIISclence a. that time? 

58 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE'LAGO 

ment" was, after all, articulated so as to initiate a resolution, a 

resolution by the workers of Kem, which would then appear in 

the ~ewspapers and be posted in the villages: 

... the intensifying class struggle inside the U.S.S.R .... and the 

danger of war which is increasing as never before 24 • • " require of 

the organs of the OGPU and USLON even greater solidarity with the 

workers, vigilance~ . ." . 

. . . by organ!zation of public opinion ... a struggle is to be waged 

against free persons' rubbing elbows ' with prisoners ... against concealment 

of escapees .. ". against purchase of stolen and government 

property from prisoners ... and against all kinds of malicious rumors 

which are being disseminated by class enemies about USLON. 

And just what were those '!malicious rumors"? That people 

were imprisoned in camp, and without cause! ' 

And one more point: ". . . it is the duty of every person to 

inform ...."20 

' 

Disgusting free people! They were making friends with zeks. 

They were concealing escapees. This was a terrible danger. If an 

end was not put to it, there would be no Archipelago. And the 

country would be a goner, and the Revolution would be ,a goner. 

And, therefore, to combat "malicious" rumors, honest progressive 

rumors were spread: that the camps were populated by murderers 

and rapists! That every escapee was a dangerous bandit! 

Lock your doors! Be frightened! Save your children! Catch them, 

turn them in, help the work of the OGPU! And if you knew of 

, someone who did not help thus-inform! 

Now, with the spread of the Archipelago, escapes multiplied. 

There was the hopelessness of the logging and road-building work 

parties-yet at the same time there was a whole continent beneath 

the feet- of the escapees. So there was hope in spite of all. However, 

escape plans had excited the Solovki prisonerS even at a 

time when SLON was still dn a totally isolated island. The 

innocents believed in the end of their three-year term, but those 

who were foresighted had already grasped the truth that they 

would never see freedom in either three or twenty-three years. 

And that meant freedom lay only in escape. 

But how could they escape from Solovki? For half a year the 

24 .. In our country thtngs are always increasing or intensifying as never be-. 

fore. They never ever get weaker. ' 

25. Solovetskiye OSlrovo, 1930, No. 2-3. p. 60.

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea' I 59 

sea was frozen over, but not solidly, and 'in places there was open 

water, and the snowstorms raged, and the frost bit hard, and 

things were enveloped in mists and darkness. And in the spring 

and for a large part of the summer there were the long white 

nights with clear visibility over long distances for the patrOlling 

cutters. And it was only when the nights began to lengthen, in 

the late summer and the autumn, that the time was right. Not for 

prisoners in the·kremlin, of course, but for those who were out 

in work parties, where a prisoner might have freedom of move-· 

ment and time to build a boat or a raft near the shore~d to 

cast off at night (even just riding off on a log for that matter) . 

and strike out at random, hoping above all to encounter a foreign 

lihip. The bustle among the guards and the embarkation of the 

cutters would reveal to the islanders the fact of an escape-and 

there would be a tremor of rejoicing among the prisoners, as if 

they were themselves escaping. They would ask in a whisper: 

Had he been caught yet? Had he been found yet? Many must 

have drowned without ever getttng anywhere. One or another of 

them reached the Karelian shore perhaps--and if he did was more 

silent than the grave .. 

And there was a famous escape from. Kem to England. This 

particular daredevil (his name is 'unknown to us-that's the 

breadth of our horizon!) knew Engl~h and concealed it. He 

managed to get assigned to loading timber in Kern, and he told 

his story to the Englishmen. The convoY discovered he was missing 

and delayed the ship' for nearly a whole week and searched 

it several times without finding the fugitive. (What happened was . 

that whenever a search party started from the shore, they lowered 

him Qverboard on the opposite side on the ahchor chain, where he 

clung under water with a breathing pipe held in his teeth.) An 

enormous fine had to be paid for delaying the ship, so they finally 

. decided to take a chance and let the ship go, thinking that perhaps 

the prisoner had drowned. 

Then a book came out in England, even it would seem, in 

more than one printing. Evidently An Island Hell by S. A. Malsagoff.28* 

. 

TJlis book astounded Europe (and no doubt they accused its 

fugitive author of exaggerating, for, after all, the friends of the 

26. And is this -another book you have not read, Sir Bertrand Russell? 


New Society could not permit themselves to believe this slanderous 

volume) because it contradicted what was already well 

known; the newspaper Rote Fahne had described Solovki as a 

paradise. (And we hope that the paper's correspondent spent time 

in the Archipelago later on.) And it also contradicted those 

albums about Solovki disseminated by Soviet diplomatic missions 

in Europe: fine-quality paper and true-to-life photographs of the 

cozy monks' cells. (Nadezhda Surovtseva, our Communist in 

Austria, received this album from the Soviet Mission in-Vienna 

and indignantly denounced the slander about Solovki current in 

Europe. And at the very same time the sister of her future husband 

was, in fact, imprisoned at Solovki, and she herself was predestined 

to be walking single file in the Yaroslavl Isolator in two 

years' time.) 

Slander or not, the breach had been a misfortune! And so a 

commission of VTsIK, under the chairmanship of the "conscience 

of the Party," Comrade Solts (Illustration No. 10), was sent off 

to find out what was going on tb.ere on those Solovetsky Islands 

(for, of course, they didn't have the least idea!). But in fact the 

commission merely rode along the Murmansk Railroad, and they 

didn't do much of anything even there. And they thought it right 

to send to the islands-no, to implore to go there!-none less 

than the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, who had recently 

returned to live in t~e proletarian Fatherland. His testimony 

would be the very best refutation of that repulsive foreign forgery. 

The rumor reached Solovki before Gorky himself-and the 

prisoners' hearts beat faster and the guards hustled and bustled. 

One has to know prisoners in order to imagine their anticipation! 

The falcon, the stormy petrel, was about to swoop down upon the 

nest of injustice, violence, and secrecy. The leading Russian 

writer! He will give them hell! He will show them! He, the father, 

will defend! They awaited Gorky almost like a universal amnesty. - 

The chiefs were alarmed too: as best they could, they hid the 

monstrosities and polished things up for show. Transports of 

prisoners were sent from the kremlin to distant work parties so 

that fewer would remain there; many patients were discharged 

from the Medical Section and the whole thing was cleaned up. 

And they set up a "boulevard" of fir trees without roots, which 

were simply pushed down into the ground. (They only had to 

last a few days before withering.) It led to the Children's Colony,

G· 


opened just three months previously and the pride of USLON, 

where everyone had clothes and where there were no socially 

hostile children, and where, of course, Gorky would be very 

interested in seeing how juveniles were being re-educated and 

saved for a future life under socialism. 

Only in Kem was there an oversight. On Popov Island the 

ship Gleb Boky was being loaded by prisoners in underwear and 

sacks, when Gorky's retinue appeared out of nowhere to embark. 

on that steamer! You inventors and thinkers! Here is a worthy 

problem for you, .given that, as the saying goes, every wise man 

has enough of the fool in him: a barren island, not one bush, no 

possible cover-and right there, at a distance of three hundred 

yards, Gorky's retinue has shown up. Your solution? Where can 

this disgraceful spec;tacle-these men dressed in sac~e hidden? 

The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for 

naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will tr:Y hard not 

to notice them, but help him! Drown them in the sea? They will 

wallow and flounder. Bury them in the earth? There's no time. 

No, only a worthy son of the Archipelago could flnd. a way out of 

this one. The work assigner ordered: "Stop work! Close ranks! 

Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!" And a tarpaulin 

was thrown over them. "Anyone who moves will be shot!" And 

the former stevedore Maxim Gorky ascended the ship's ladder 

and admired the landscape from the steamer for a full hour till 

sailing time-and he didn't notice! 

That was June 20,1929. The famous writer disembarked from 

the steamer in Prosperity Gulf. Next to him was his fiancee, all 

dressed in leather-a black leather service cap, a leather jacket, 

leather riding breeches, and high narrow boots-a living symbol· 

of the OGPU shoulder to shoulder with Russian literature. 

Surrounded by the commanding officer corps of the GPU, 

Gorky marched with long swift strides through the corridors of 

several barracks. The room doors were all wide open, but he 

entered hardly any. In the Medical Section doctors and nurses 

in clean robes formed up for him in two rows, but he didn't even 

look around and went on out. From there the Chekists of USLON 

fearlessly took him to Sekirka. And what was there to see there? 

It turned out that there was no overcrowding in the punishment 

cells, and-,-the main point-no poles. None at all. Thieves sat 

on benchel! (there was already a multitude of thieves in Solovki), 


and they were all ... reading newspapers. None of them was so 

bold as to get up and complain, but they did think up one trick: 

they held the newspapers upside down! And Gorky went up to 

one of them and in silence turned the newspaper right side up! 

He had noticed it! He had understood! He would not abandon 

them. He would defend them!21 / 

They went to the Children's Colony. How decent everything 

was there. Each was on a separate cot, with a mattress. They 

all crowded around in a group and all of them were happy. And 

all of a sudden a.fourteen-year-old boy said: "Listen here, Gorky! 

Everything you see here is false. Do you want to know the tru~? 

Shall 1 tell you?" Yes, nodded the writer. Yes,_he wanted to know 

the truth. (Oh, you bad boy, why do you want to spoil the just 

recently'arranged prosperity of the-literary patriarch? A. palace 

in Moscow, an estate outside Moscow ... ) And so everyone was 

ordered to leave, including the children and the accompanying 

gaypayooshniki-and the boy spent an hour and a half telling 

the whole story to the lanky old man. Gorky left the barracks, 

streaming tears. He was given a carriage to go to dinner at the 

villa of the camp chief. And the boys rushed back into the barracks. 

"Did you tell him about the mosquito treatment?" "Yes." 

"Did you tell him about the pole torture?" "Yes." "Did you tell 

him about the prisoners hitched up instead of horses?" "Yes." 

"And how they roll them down the stairs? And about the sacks? 

And about being made to spend the night in the snow?" And it 

turned out that the truth-loving boy had told all ... all ... all!!! 

But we don't even know his name. 

On June 22, in other words after his chat with the boy, Gorky 

·left the following inscription in the "Visitors' Book," which had 

been specially made for this visit: 

"I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just 

27. The gaypayooshnitsa-the GPU woman agent-who was Gorky's companion 

also exe.rcised her pen, and here is what she wrote: "We are getting to 

know the life of the Solovetsky Camp. I went to the museum .••• All of us 

went to 'Sekir-Hill.' From it there was a wonderful view of the lake. The 

water in the lake was coldly dark blue in color and around the lak,: was a 

forest. It seemed to be· bewitched, and as the light shifted, the tops of the 

pines flared up, and the mirror-like lake became fiery. Silence and astonishing 

beauty. On the way back we passed the peat workings. In the evening we listened 

to a concert. We dined on local' Solovetsky herring--small but SUrprisingly 

tender and tasty. They melted in the mouth." From M. Gorky i Syn (M. 

Gorky and Son)·, Moscow, Nauka, 1971, p.276.


a few words. I wouldn't want, yes, and I would likewise be 

ashamed [I], to permit myself banal praise of the remarkable 

energy of people who, while remaining vfgilantand tireless sen- . 

tinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably 

bold creators of culture."2B 

On June 23 Gorky left Solovki. Hardly had his steamer pulled 

away from the pier than they shot the boy. (Oh, great interPreter 

of the human heart! Great connoisseur of- human beings! How 

could he hav~ failed to take the boy along with him?!) 

. And that is how faith in justice was instilled in the new generation. 

_ . 

They try to tell us that up there on the summit the chief of 

literature made excuses, that he didn't want to publish praise of 

USLON. But how can that be, Aleksei Maximovich? With bourgeois 

Europe looking on?! But right now, right at this very 

moment, . which is so dangerous and so complicated! And the 

camp regimen there? We'll change it, we'll change the camp 

. regimen. . 

And he did publish his statement, and it was republished over 

and over in the big free press, bOth our own and that of the West, 

in the name of the Falcon and Stormy Petrel, claiming it was 

nonsense to frighten people with Solovki, and that prisoners lived 

remarkably well there and were being well reformed. 

And descending into his coffin, he gave his blessing to the Archipelago.2D 

And as for the camp regimen, they kept their promise. The 

regimen was reformed. Now in the 11 th Punishment Company 

they were kept standing for a week packed against one another. 

A commiSsion c~me to Solovki, and it wasn't a Solts commission 

either, but an investigative-punitive commission. It delved into 

28. Solovetskiye Ostrova, 1929, No.1, p .. 3. (This inscription is not included 

in Gorky's collected works.) , 

29. I used to ascribe Gorky's pitiful conduct after his I return from Italy 

and right up to his death to his delusions and folly. But his recently published 

correspondence of the twenties provides a reason for explaining it on lesser 

grounds: material self-interest. In Sorrento Gorky was astonished to' discover 

that no world fame had accrued to him, nor money either. (He had a whole 

palace full of servants.) It became clear that both for money and ~o revive his 

fame he had to return to the Soviet Union and accept all the attached conditions. 

He thereby became Yagoda's voluntary prisoner. And Stalin killed him 

to no purpose, out of excessive caution: Gorky would have sung -hymns ·of 

praise to 1937.too. 


things and, with the help of the local ISCh, came to understand 

that all the cruelties of the Solovetsky camp regime were the work 

. of the White Guards of-the ACh, and of the aristocrats in general, 

and partly of the students too (those very same students who 

since the past century had been setting St. Petersburg on fire). 

At this point the silly unsuccessful escape attempt of ,the insane 

Kozhevrukov (former minister of the Far Eastern Republic) together 

with Shepchinsky and Degtyaryov, the cowboy, was inflated 

into an enormous and fantastic plot by the White Guards, 

who were allegedly scheming to seize a steamship and sail away. 

And they began to make arrests; and even though no one confessed 

to s,:!ch a plot, the case kept on growing, as did the arrests. 

They had set themselves a figure of "three hundred." And they 

reached it. And on the night of Octob~r 15, 1929, having dispersed 

everyone and locked them up in quarters, the Holy Gates, 

ordinarily kept locked, were opened so as to shorten the route to 

the cemetery. They kept taking groups there the whole night 

long. (And each group was accompanied by the desperate howling 

of the dog Black, who had been tied up somewhere and who 

suspected that his master Bagratuni was being led off in each new 

group. The prisoners could count the number of groups being 

taken off by the number of periods of howling; but because of a 

strong wind the shots themselves were less audible. This howling 

had such an impact on the executioners that the next day they 

shot not only Black but also all. the other dogs on account of 

Black.) 

The executioners were the three fancy Dan junkies, plus the 

chief of the camp guard, Degtyaryov, and, no less, the Chief of 

the Cultural and Educational Section, Uspensky. (The combination 

was only superficially astonishing. This Uspensky's biography 

is what is called typical, in other words not the most common, 

but concentrating in itself the essence of the epoch. He was born 

the son of a priest, and that is what he was when the Revolution 

caught up with him. What did he have to look forward to? 

Security questionnaires, restrictions, exile, persecution. And there 

is no pessible way to erase this from one's record, no possible wax 

to change one's father. But no, Uspensky discovered there was a 

way: he killed his own father and declared to the authorities that 

he had done it out of class hatred! This was a healthy attitude, 

and almost not murder at all! He was given an easy sentenc~


and he immediately rose in the camp in the Cultural and Equcational 

line of work and was soon liberated, and here we come 

upon him as the free Chief of the Cultural and Educational Section, 

the KVCh, of Solovki. And as far as these executions are 

concerned, it is not known whether he volunteered or whether 

they suggested he reaffirm his class position. By night's end, at 

any rate, he was seen washing off the blood-soaked tops of his 

boots, one after the other, over a washbasin.) And in Illustration 

No. 19 it is perhaps he on the far right, though it may merely be 

someone else with the same name. 

They were drunk and careless-.-and in the morning the enormous 

pit, only lightly covered over, was still stirring and moving. 

Throughout October, and during November too, they brought 

additional groups from the mainland for execution. 30 

(Somewhat later the entire cemetery was leveled by the prisoners 

while a band played in the background.) 

After those executions the chief of SLON was replaced: Zarin 

came to replace Eichmans, and it is considered that a new era of 

Solovetsky legality was thereby established. 

However, here is what it was -I,ike. In the summer of 1930 they· 

brought to Solovki several dozen religious sectarians who rejected 

anything that came from anti-Christ: they refused to accept any 

documents, including passports, and they refused to sign for any 

.thing or to handle any money. At their head was a gray-bearded 

old man of eighty, blind and bearing a long statIo Every enlight- 

, ened person could clearly see that these sect!lrians could never 

ever enter into Socialism, because that required having a great 

deal to do with papers-and that therefore the best thing for 

them to do was to die. And so they sent them off to Maly Zayatsky 

Island, the smallest in the entire Solovetsky archipelago-sandy, 

unforested desert, containing a summer hut of the former monkfishermen. 

And' they expressed willingness to give them two 

months' rations, the conditipn being that each one of the sectarians 

would have to sign for them on the invoice. Of course they 

refused. At this point the indefatigable Anna Skripnikova intervened; 

notwithstanding her own youth and the youth of the Soviet 

government, she had already been arrested for the fourth time. 

She dashed- back and forth between the accounting .office, the 

30. In one of them Kurilko was shot. 


work assigners, and the chief of the c~p himseH, who was 

engaged In putting into effect the humanitarian regimen~ She 

first besought compassion for them, and after that she begged to 

. be sent to the Zayatsky Islands with the sectarians as their clerk, 

undertaking the obligation of issuing food to them each day and 

conducting all the bookkeeping formalities for them. And it would 

appear that this didn't conflict in any respect with the camp 

system. And the chiefs refused. "But they feed insane people 

without asking for signatures on receipts!" Anna cried. Zarin 

only burst out laughing. And a woman work assigner replied: 

"Maybe those are Moscow's orders-we don't really know .... " 

(Of course, they were instructions from Moscow-for who else 

would have taken the responsibility?) And so they were sent off 

without food. Two months later (exactly two months because 

they were then to be-asked to sign for their food for the next two 

months) they sailed over to Maly Zayatsky and found only 

corpses which had been picked by. the birds. Everyone was there. 

No one had escaped. 

So who now is going to seek out those guilty? In the sixties of 

our great century? 

Anyway, Zarin, too, was soon removed from his post-for 

liberalism. (And it seems he got ten years himseH.) 

• 

From the end of the twenties Ute face of the Solovetsky Camp 

changed. From a silent trap for the doomed KR's it was transformed 

increasingly into the then new, but to us old, species of 

generalized ITL or Corrective Labor Camp. The number of 

"especially dangerous criminals from among the workers" multiplioo 

rapidly in the nation, and they herded the nonpolitical 

offenders and hoodlums to Solovki. Both veteran thieves and 

beginning thieves landed on Solovki. A big wave of women thieves 

and prostitutes poured in. (And when they encountered each 

other at the Kern Transit Camp, the women thieves yelled at the 

prostitutes: "We may steal, but we don't sell ourselves." And the. 

prostitutes shouted back: "We sell what belongs to us, not stolen 

goods.") The fact of the matter was that a war against -prostitution 

had been proclaimed throughout the country (not in the newspapers, 

of course), and so they rounded them all up in all the


big cities and pasted a standard three years on all of them and 

drove many of them to Solovki. In theory it was quite cl~ that 

honest labor would swiftly reform them. However, for some 

reason they clung "stubbornly to their socially humiliating profession, 

and while en route they asked to be allowed to wash 

floo(S in the convoy guards' barracks and seduced the Red Army 

men, subverting the statutes of the convoy service. And they made 

friends just as"easily with the jailers-not for free, of course. They 

arranged things even better for theI1lselves on Solovki, which was 

so statved for women. They were allotted the best rooms in the 

living quarters and every day new clothes and gifts were brought 

them, and the so-called "nuns" and the other KR women earned 

money by working for them, embroidering their underthings. And 

on completion of their terms, nch as never before, with suitcases 

full of silks, they returned home to begin an honest life. 

And the thieves spent their time playing cards. And the women 

thieves found it useful to bear children on Solovki; there were 

no nurseries and by havin~ a child they could get themselves 

released from work for their whole short term. (The KR women 

who preceded them had refused to take this way out.) 

On March 12, 1929, the first group of juveniles arrived at 

Solovki, and from then on they kept sending and sending them 

(all of them_under sixteen). At first they were quartered in the 

Children's Colony near the kremlin with those same showpiece 

cots and :r;nattresses. They hid their government-issue clothing and 

shouted that they had nothing to go out to work" in. And then 

they, too, were sent off to logging-from which they fled, switching 

all their names and their terms, and they had to be caught 

and thereupon sorted out allover again. 

With the arrival of a socially healthy contingent of prisoners, . 

the Cultunil and Educational Section came to life. They campaigned 

for the liquidation of illiteracy. (But the thieves had not 

the slightest problem in telling the difference between clubs and 

hearts.) They posted a slogan: "A prisoner is an active participant 

in socialist construction!" And they even thought up a term for 

it too-reforging. (It was here that this term was invented.) 

In September, 1930, came the appeal of the Central Committee 

to all workers for the development of socialist competition and 

the shock-worker movement. And how could the prisoners not 

be included? (If free people everywhere were being harnessed up, 


then wasn't it also necessary to put the prisoners between the 

shafts?) 

From here on our information comes not from living people 

but from the book of the scholar-jurist Averbakh. 31 

And therefore we suggest that the reader may wish to divide 

this information by 16 or maybe by 256, and sometimes it even 

needs to be taken in a reverse sense. 

In the autumn of 1930 there was created a Solovetsky staff for 

socialist cOinpetition and the shock-worker movement. Inveterate 

repeaters, murderers, and cutthroats suddenly emerged "in the 

role of economy-minded managers, skilIed technical directors, 

and capable cultural workers." G. Andreyev recalls: they used 

to scteanl in one's face: "Come aC{oss with your norm, you KR.~' 

The thieves and bandits had no sooner read the appeal. of the 

Central Committee than they threw away their knives and their 

playing cards and simply burned with thirst to create a Commune. 

They wrote into the statutes that the social origin of members 

must be either poor or middle-level peasant families or the 

working class. (And it need be said that all the thieves were 

registered in the Records and Classification Section as "former 

workers"-so that ShepcJ.tinsky's former slogan almost came t~e: 

"Solovki-for the Workers aIid Peasants!") And on no account 

would 58's be admitted. (And the commune members also proposed 

that all their prison terms be added together and divided 

by their number so as to arrive at an average term-and that on 

its expiration they should all be freed simultaneously! But notwiths.tanding 

the Communist character of this proposal, the 

Chekists considered it politically premature.) The slogan of the 

Solovetsky Commune was: "Let us pay our debt to the working 

class!" And even better was the one: "From us-everything, to 

lls-nothingt'32 And here is the ferocious penalty they thought 

up to punish members of the commune who were guilty of infractions: 

to forbid them to go out to work! (Now it would be 

quite hard to find a stiffer punishment for a thief than that!!) 

. Nonetheless the Solovetsky administration, which was not 

about to go as far as the cultural and educational officials, did 

not base its faith too heavily on the thieves' enthusiasm, but in- 

3 I. 1. L. Averbakh, op. cit. 

32. This particular slogan. which was fully mature, Was probably worthy of 

All-Union dissemination.


stead "applied the Leninist principle: 'Shock work-Shock maintenance.''' 

What this meant was that the commune members 

were moved into separate barracks where they got softer bedding, 

warmer clothing, and were fed separately and better (at the expense 

of all the rest of the prisoners, of course). Tlie commune 

members liked this very much, and for the purpose of keeping 

all their fellow members in the commune, they established the 

rule that-there would be no more expulsions from it. 

This sort of .commune was also very popular among rwncom- 

. mune members. And ~ey all applied for admission to the 

commune. However," it was decided not to take them into the 

commune but to create second, third, and fourth "labor collectives," 

which would not have all those privileges. And in any 

case, the 58's were not accepted in any of the collectives, even 

though in the newspaper the most impudent of the hoodlums 

instructed the 58's: It's time, really, it's time, to grasp that camp 

is a school for labor! 

dn~ the reports were flown by·plane to Gulag headquarters: 

Miracles at Solovki! A turbulent turning point in the attitude of 

--the thieves! All the Plll!sion of the criminal world had been redirected 

into shock work, socialist competition, fulfillment of 

the production aRd financial plan! And in Gulag they were suitably 

astonished, and they broadcast the results of the experiment. 

And that is how Solovki began to live: part of the camp was 

in the "labor collectives," and their percentage of plan fulfillment 

had· not simply risen but doubled! (And the Cultural and 

Educational Section explained this by the influence of the collective. 

But we know what it was--common garden-variety camp 

padding of work sheets--"tukhta.")83 

The other part of the camp, the "unorganized" part (yes, and 

also underfed, and underdressed, and engaged in * heaviest 

work), failed, as one can well understand, to fulfill its work 

norms. 

In February. 1931, a conference of Solovetsky shock brigades 

70 I THB GULAG ARCHI]>BLAGO 

deCreed "a broad wave of socialist competition to answer the 

new slander of the capitalists about forced labor'in the U.S.S:R." 

In March there were already 136 shock brigades. then suddenly 

in April their general liquidation was decreed-because 

"a llostile-claSs element had permeated the collectives for the 

pUrpose of causing them to disintegrate." (Now there's a rid~e' 

for you: the 58's were nof allowed across the threshold; and so 

who was it who Was causing them to disintegrate? What~we have 

to understand is that the "tukhta" had been uncovered. They had 

eaten and drunk and made merry; they had counted things up, 

shed a few tears, and taken the whip to some so the rest would 

get moving.) 

And the joyous hubbub gave way to the noiseless dispatCh of 

the prisoner transports: the 58's were being sent from the Solovetsky 

mother tumor to far-oft' fatal places to open up new camps 

there. 

33. J have been reproached with spelling this word incorrectly, and told 

that it should be written as it is correctly pronounced in thieves' jargon: luFla. 

For tllKHta is the peasants' assimilation of it, just like "Khvyodor" for "Fyodor." 

But I like it: "tuKHta" is somehow akin to the'RuAian language, while 

"tuFta" is totally alien. The thieves bfought it, but the whole Russian people 

learned it--so let it be ''tuKHta."

72 I. THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Chapter 3 

• 

The Archipelago M et(,lstasizes 

Well, the Archipelago did not develop on its own' but side by 

side with the whole country. As long as there was unemployment 

in the nation there was no feverish demand for prisoner manpower, 

and arrests took place not as a means· of mobilizing labor put 

as a means of sweeping clean the road. But when the concept 

arose of stirring up the whole 180 million with an enormous 

mixing paddle, when the plan for superindustrialization was re- 

. jected in favor of the plan for supersupersuperindustrialization, 

when the liquidation ~f the kulaks was already foreseen along 

with the massive public works of the First Five-Year Plan-on 

the eve of the Year of the Great Fracture the view of the Archipelago 

and everything in the Archipelago changed too. 

On March 26,· 1928, the Council of People's Commissars 

(meaning it was still under the chairmanship of Rykoy) conducted 

a review of the status of penal policy in the nation arid of 

conditions in places of imprisonment. In regard to penal policy, 

it was admitted that it was jnadequate. And it was decreed 1 that 

harsh measures of repression should be applied to class enemies 

and hostile-class elements, that the camp regimen should be made 

more severe (and that socially unstable elements should not be 

given terms at all). And in addition: forced labor shOUld be set 

up in such a way that. the prisoner should not earn anything from 

his work but that the state should derive economic profit from it. 

"And to consider it necessary from now onJo expand the capacity 

. • I. TsOAOR, collection 393, shelf 78, file 6S, sheets 369--372. 

of hlbor colonies." In other wordfi, putting it simply, it was proposed 

that more camps be prepared in anticipation of the abundant 

arrests planned. (Trotsky also had foreseen this same 

economic necessity, except that he again proposed that a labor 

army be created by the compulsory drafting of people. The horseradish 

is no sweeter than the black radish. But whether out of a 

spirit of opposition to his eternal rival 0):' whether in order to cut 

people off more decisively from the possibility of complaint and 

hope of return, Stalin decided to process the labor army men 

through the prison machinery.) Throughout the nation unemployment· 

was abolished, and the economic rationale for expansion 

of the camps appeared. 

Back in 1923 no more than three thousand persons had been 

imprisoned on Solovki. And by 1930 there were already about 

fifty thousand, yes, and another thirty thousand in Kern. In 1928 

the Solovetsky cancer began to creep outward, first through Karelia, 

on road-building projects and in logging for export. Just as 

willingly SLON began to "sell" its engineers: they went off without 

convoy to work in any northern locality and· their wages 

were credited to the camp. By 1929 SLON camp sites had already 

appeared at all points on the Murmansk Railroad from 

Lodeinoye Pole to Taibola. From there the movement continued 

along the Vologda Railroad-and so active was it that at Zvanka 

Station it proved necessary to open up a SLON transport control 

center. By 1930 Svirlag had already grown strong in Lodeinoye 

Pole and stood on its own legs, and in Kotlas Kotlag had already 

been formed. In 1931 BelBaltlag had been born, with its center 

in Medvezhyegorsk, 2 which was destined over the next two years 

to bring glory to the Archipelago for eternity and on five continents. 

. 

And the malignant cells kept on creeping and creeping. They 

were blocked on one side by the· sea and. on the other by the Finnish 

border, but there was nothing to hinder the founding of a 

camp near Krasnaya Vishera in 1929. And the main thing was 

that all the paths to the east through the Russian North lay open 

and unobstfl:1cted. Very soon the Soroka-Kotlas road was reaching 

out. ("We'll complete Soroka ahead of 'sroka'-ahead of 

2. This was the official date, but in actual fact it had been there since 1930, 

though its organizational period had been kept secret to give the impression 

of rapid work, for bragging, and for history. Here, too, was ''tukhta." 

71

The Archipelago Metastasizes I 73 

term!" The Solovetsky prisoners used to make fun of S. Alymov, 

who, nonetheless, stuck to his last and made his name as a poef 

and song writer.) Cre~ping on to the Northern DvinaRiver, the 

camp cells formed SevDvinlag. Crossing it, they fearlessly 

marched OR the Urals. By 1931 the Northern Urals department 

of SLON was founded, which soon gave rise to the independent 

Solikamlag and SevUrallag. The Berezniki Camp began the 

construction of a big chemical combine which in its time was 

- much publicized. In the summer of 1929 an expedition of UDconvoyed 

prisoners was sent to the Chibyu River from Solovki, 

under the leadership of the geologist M. V .. Rushchinsky, in order 

to prospect for petroleum, which had been discovered there as 

far back as the eighties of the nineteenth century. The expedition 

was successful-and a camp was set up on the Ukhta, 

Ukhtlag. But it, too, did not stand still on its own spot, but 

quickly metastasized to the northeast, annexed the- Pechora, and 

was transformed into UkhtPechlag. Soon afterward it had its 

Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, and Vorkuta sections--all' of them the 

bases of great independent future camps.s 

The opening up of so expansive a roadless northern region' as 

this required the building of a railroad: from Kotlas via Knyazh 

Pogost and Ropcha to Voi'kuta. This called forth the need for 

two more independent camps which were railroad-building 

camps: SevZhelDorlag--:-n the sector from Kotlas to the Pechora 

River-and Pechorlag (not to be confused with the industrial 

UkhtPechlag!)-on the sector from the Pechora River 

to Vorkuta. (True, this railroad was under construction for a 

. long time. Its-Vym sector, from Knyazh-Pogost to Ropcha, was 

ready for service in 1938, but the whole railroad was ready only 

at the end of 1942.) 

And thus from the depths of the tundra and the taiga rose 

hl,lDdreds of new medium-sized and small islands. And on the 

march, in battle order, a new system of organization of the Archipelago 

was created: Camp Administrations, Camp Divisions, 

Camps (OLP's-Separate Camps'; KOLP's-Commandant's 

Camps; GOLP's-Head Camps), Camp Sectors (and these were 

the same as "work parties" and "work subparties"). And in the 

3. We are giving dates and places equal weight but beg the reader to bear 

in mind that all this was gotten throuB9. questioning people and c;omparing. 

so there may be omissions and errors. 

74 'I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Administrations ~he~e were Departments, and in the Divisions 

'there were Sections: I. Production (P.); II. Records and Classification 

(URCh); III., Security Operations (again the third!). 

(And in contemporary dissertations they wrote: "The contours 

of educational institutions for individdal undisciplined 

members of the classless society are taking shape ahead of time.'" 

In actual fact, when there are no more classes, there will be no 

more criminals. But somehow it takes your breath away just to 

think that tomorrow society will be clasles~d does that 

mean that no one will be imprisoned? Only individual undisciplined 

members. Classless society is not without its lockups 

either.) 

" And so all the northern portion of the Archipelago sprang 

from Solovki. But not from there alone. In response to the great 

appeal, Corrective Labor Camps (JTL's) and Corrective Labor 

Colonies (ITK's) burst out in a 'rash throughout our whole great 

country. Every province acquired its own ITL's and ITK's. Millions 

of mile.s of barbed wire ran on and on, the strands crisscrossing 

one another and interweaving, their barbs twinkling 

gaily ~ railroads, highways, and around the outskirts of cities. 

And t1lepeaked roofs of ugly camp watchtowers became the 

most ~dable landpIarks in our landscape, and it was only by 

a surprising concatenation of circumstances that they were not 

seen in either the canvases of our artists or in scenes in our films. 

As had been happening from the Civil War on, monastery' 

buildiI)gs were intensively mobilized for camp needs, were ideally 

adapted for isolation by their very locations. The Boris and Gleb 

Monastery in Torzhok was put to use as a transit camp (still . 

there today), while the Valdai Monastery was put to liSe for a 

colony of juveniles (across the lake from the future country 

house of Zhdanov). Nilova Hermitage on Stolbny Island in Lake 

Seliger became a camp. Sarovskaya Hermitage was used for 

the nest'of Potma C1lmps, and there is no end to this enumeration. 

Camps arose in the Donbas, on the upper, Jniddle, and lower 

Volga; in the central and southern Urals, in Transcaucasia, in 

central Kazakhstan, in CentraL Asia, in Siberia, and in the Far 

East. It is officially reported that in 1932 the area devoted to 

Agricultural Corrective Labor Colonies in the Russian Republic 

4. Vysbinsky, op. cit., p. 429.


alone-=-was 625,000 acres, and in the Ukranian Republic 138,- 

000.6 . 

Estimating the average colony at 2,500 acres, we learn that at 

this time, without counting the other Soviet republics, there were 

already more than .three hundred ·such Selkhozy alone, in other, 

words the lowest grade and most privileged form of camp. 

The distribution of prisoners between near and· distant camps 

was easily determined by a decree of the Central Executive Committee 

and the Council of People's Commissars of November 6, 

1929. (How they do manage· to hit the anniversary dates of the 

Revolution!) The former "strict isolation"-detention---was 

abolished (because it hindered creative labor), and it was ordainedthat 

those sentenced to terms of less than three years 

would be assigned to the general (near) places of imprisonment, 

while thos~ sentenced to from ~e to ten years would be sent 

to distant localities. 6 Since the 58's never got less than three 

years, that meant that they all flocked to the North and to Siberia 

-to open it up and to die. 

And the rest of us during those years were marching to the 

beat of drums! 

• 

A stubborn legend persists in the Archipelago to the effect that 

"The camps were thought up by Frenkel." 

It seems to me that this fanciful idea, both unpatriotic and 

even insulting to the authorities, is quite sufficiently refuted by 

the preceding chapters. Even with the meager means at our disposal 

we· succeeded, I hope, in showing the birth of camps, for 

repression and labor back in 1918. Without any Frenk.el whatsoever 

they arrived at the conclusion that prisoners must not 

waste their time in moral contemplation ("The purpose of Soviet 

corrective labor policy is not at all individual correction in its 

traditional meaning") T but must labor, and at the same time 

must be given very severe, almost unbearable work norms to 

achieve. Long before Frenkel they already used to say: "correc- 

5. Ibid., pp. 136-137. _ 

6. Sobraniye,Zakonov SSSR (Collection of Laws of the U.s.s.R.), 1929, No. 

72 •. 

7.Vysbinsky,.op. cit., p. 384. 

76 I THE GULA-G ARCHIPELAGO 

tion through labor" (and as far back as Eichmans they already 

understood this to mean "destruction through labor"). 

Yes, and not even contemporary dialectical thought processes 

were needed to arrive at the idea of using prisoners sentenced to 

heavy labor for work in remote, little-settled areas: Back in 1890, 

in the Ministry of Railroads they decided to use hard-labor exiles 

in the Amur region for laying rails on the railroad. They simply 

forced the hard-labor prisoners to work; while exiles and deportees 

were permitted to work at laying rails, and in return got a 

reduction in their terms by one"third or one-half. (However, they 

preferred to get rid of their whole term all at once by escape.) 

And from 1896 -to 1900, work on the Lake Baikal shoreline 

sector of the Trans-Siberian W!lS carried- out by fifteen hundred 

hard-labor prisoners and twenty-five hundred compulsorily resettled 

exiles. 8 Therefore the idea was by no means new, and-not 

founded on progressive educational th~ories. 

Nonetheless, Frenkel really did become the nerve of the Archipelago. 

He was one of those -successful men of action whom 

History hungrily awaits and summons to itself. It would seem 

that there had been camps even before Frenkel, _but they had 

not taken on that final and unified form which savors of perfection. 

Every genuine prophet arrives when he is most acutely 

needed. Frenkel arrived in the Archipelago just at the beginning 

of the metastases. -- 

Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a Turkish Jew, was born in Constantinople. 

He graduated from the commercial institute there 

and took up the timber trade. He founded a firm in Mariupol 

and soon became a millionaire, "the timber king of the Black 

Sea." He had his own steamers, and he even published his own 

newspaper in Mariupol called The Kopeck, whose function was 

to slander and persecute his competitors. During World War· I 

_ Frenkel conducted some speculative arms deals through Gallipoli. 

8. However, generally speaking, the course of development in nineteenthcentury 

Russian hard labor was in just the reverse direction: _ labor became 

ever less obligatory, withered away. By the nineties, even at Kari, hard-labor 

camps had been transformed into places of passive detention and work was _ 

no longer performed. By this time, too, the demands made on workers had 

been eased at Akatui (P. Yakubovich). So the use of hard-labor prisoners on 

thc Luke Baikal shoreline sector of the railroad was most likely a temporary 

necessity. Do we not observe here once -again the ''two horn" principle, or 

that of a parabola, just as in the case of the long·ter~ prisons (Part I, .Chapter 

9): onc prong of increasing leniency and one of increasing ferocity? _


In 1916, sensing the pending storm in Russia, he transferred his 

capital to Turkey even before the February Revolution, and in 

1917 he himself went to Constantinople in pursuit of it. 

And he could have gone on living the sweetly exciting life of . 

a merchant, and he would have known no bitter grief and would 

not have turned into a legend. But some fateful force beckoned 

him to the Red power.s 

The rumor is unverified that in those years in· Constantinople 

he became the resident Soviet intelligence agent (perhaps for 

ideological reasons, for it is 'otherwise difficult to see why he 

needed it) • But it is a fact that in the NEP years he callie to the 

U.S.S.R., and here, on secret instructions from the GPU, created, 

as if in his own name, a black market for the purchase of valuables 

and gold in return for Soviet paper rubles (this was a 

predecessor of the "gold drive" of the GPU and Torgsin). Business 

operators and manipulators remembered him very well indeed 

from the old days; they trusted him-and the gold flowed 

into the coffers of the GPU. The purchasing operation came to 

an end, and, in gratitude, the GPU arrested him. Every wise man 

has enough of the simpleton in him. 

However, inexhaustible and holding no grudges, Frenkel, 

while still in the Lubyanka or on the way to Solovki; sent some 

sort of declaration to the top .. Finding himself in a trap, he evidently 

decided to make a bu~ines analysis of this life· too. He 

was brought to Solovki. iri 1927, but was immediately separated 

from the prisoner transport, settled into a stone booth outside 

the bounds of the monastery itself, provided with an orderly to 

look after him, and permitted free, movement about the island. 

We have already recalled that he became the Chief of the Economic 

Section (the privilege of a free man) and expressed his 

famous thesis about using up the prisoner in the first three mC?nths •. 

In 1928 he was already in Kem. There he created a profitable 

auxiliary enterprise. He brought to Kem the leather which ~ad 

been accumulated by the monks for decades and had been lying 

uselessly in the monastery warehouses. He recruited furriers and 

shoemakers from among the prisoners and supplied fashionable 

high"quality footwear and leather goods directly to a special shop 

on Kuznetsky Most in Moseow. (The GPU ran it and took the 

9. I have a ~nal hyPOthesis about this, which I will'mention elsewhere. 

78 I 'THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

receipts, but the ladies who bought their shoes there didn't know 

that, and when they themselves were hauled off to the Archi 

. pelago not long after, they never even· remembered the shop.) 

One day in 1929 an airplane flew from Moscow to get Frenkel 

and brought him to an appointment with Stalin. The Best 

Friend of prisoners (and the Best Friend of the Chekists) talked 

. interestedly with Frenkel for three hours .. The stenographic report 

of this conversation will never become public. There simply 

was none. But it is clear that Frenkel unfolded before the Father 

of the Peoples dazzling prospects for constructing socialism 

through the use of prisoner labor. Much of the geography of the 

Archipelago being described in the aftermath by my obedient 

pen, he sketched in bold strokes on the map of the Soviet Union 

to the accompaniment of the puffing of his interlocutor~s pipe. 

It was Frenkel in person, apparently on that precise occasion, 

who proposed the all-embracing system of classification of camp 

prisoners into Groups A, B, C, D, which left no leeway to the 

camp chiefs ,and even less to the prisoner: everyone not engaged 

in providing essential services for the camp (B), not verified 

as being ill (G), and not undergoing correction in a punishment 

cell (D) must drag his workload (A) every day of his sentence. 

The world history of hard labor has never known such universality! 

It was Frenkel in person, and in this very conversation, who 

proposed renouncing the reactionary system of equality in feeding 

prisoners and who outlined a unified system of redistribution 

of the meager food supplies for the whole Archipelago-a scale 

for bread rations and a scale for hOt-food rations which was 

adapted by him from the Eskimos: a fish on a pole held out in 

front of the running dog team. In addition, he proposed time off 

sentence and release ahead of term as rewards for good work 

(but in this respect he waS hardly original-for in 1890, in Sakhalin 

hard labor, Chekhov discovered both the one and the 

other). In all probability the first experimental field was set up 

here too-the great Belomorstroi, the White Sea-Baltic Canal 

Construction Project, to which the enterprising foreign-exchange 

and gold speculator would soon be appointed-not as chief of 

construction 'nor as chief of a camp either, but to the post especially 

dreamed up for him of "works chier'-the chief overseer of 

the labor battle. 

And here he is himself (Illustration No. 11). It is evident


10. Aron Solts 11. Naftaly Frenkel 

12. Yakov Rappoport 13. Matvei Berman 

14. Lazar Kogan 15. Genrikh Yagoda 

from his face how he brimmed with a· vicious human-hating 

animus. In the book on the Belomor Canal-the White Sea 

Baltic Canal-wishing to laud Frenkel, one Soviet writer would 

soon describe him thus: ..... tbe eyes of an interrogator and a 

prosecutor, the lips of a skeptic and a satirist ... A man with 

enormous love of power and pride, for whom the main thing is 

unlimited power. If it is necessary for him to be feared, then let 

him be feared. He spoke harshly to the engineers, attempting to 

humiliate them."10 

This last phrase seems to us a keystonC'-to both the character 

and biography of Frenkel. 

By the start of Belomorstroi Frenkel had been freed. For .construction 

of the Belomor Canal he received the Order of Lenin 

and was named Chief of Construction of BAMlag ("The Baikal 

AmurMain Line Railroad"-which was a name out of t~e future, 

while in the thirties BAMlag was put to work adding a 

" second track to the Trans-Siberian main line on those sectors 

where there was none). And this was by no means the last item 

in the career .of Naftaly Frenkel, but it is more relevant to complete 

the account in the next chapter . 

• 

The whole long history of the Archipelago, about which it has 

fallen to me to write this home-grown, homemade book, has, 

in the course of half a century, found in the Soviet Union almost 

no expression whatever in the printed word. In this a role' was 

played by that saDie unfortunate happenstance by which camp 

watchtowers never got into s.cenes in films nor into landscapes 

painted by our artists . 

. But this was not true of the White Sea-Baltic Canal nor of 

the Moscow-Volga Canal. There is a book about 'each at our 

disposal, and we can write this chapter at least on the basis 

of doc~mentary and responsible source material. 

. In diligently researched studies, before making use of a particular 

source, it is considered proper' to characterize it. We 

shall do so. 

' 

10. Be/omorsko-Ba/tiisky Kanal imeni Stalina, Istoriya' Stroite/slVa (The 

White Sea-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin; History of Its Constrllction), Chapter 

8. .


Hefe before us lies the volume, in format almost equal to the 

Holy Gospels, with the portrait of the Demigod engraved in 

bas-relief on the cardboard covers. The book, entitled The White 

Sea-Baltic Stalin Canal, was issued by the State Publishing House 

in 1934 and dedicated by the authors to the Seventeenth Congress 

of the Soviet Communist Party, and it was evidently pub- 

. lished for the Congress. It is an extension of the Gorky project 

of "Histories of Factories and Plants." Its editors were Maxim 

Gorky, I. L. Averbakh,* and S. G. Firin. This last name is little 

known in literary circles, and we shall explain why: Semyon 

Firin, notwithstan~g his youth, was Deputy Chief of Gulag. ll 

The history of thi~ book is as follows: On August 17, 1933, 

an outing of 120 writers took place aboard a steamer on the 

just completed canal. D. P. Vitkovsky, a prisoner who was a 

construction superintendent on the canal, witnessed the way these 

people in white suits crowded on the deck during the steamer's 

passage through the locks, summoned prisoners from the area of 

the locks (where by this time they were more operational workers 

than construction workers), and, in the presence of the canal 

chiefs, asked a prisoner whether he loved his canal and hi~ work, 

and did he think that he' had managed to reform here, and did 

the chiefs take enough interest in the welfare of the prisoners? 

TIiere were many questions, all in this gener,al vein, and all asked 

from shipboard to shore. in the presence of the chiefs and only 

",hile the steamer was passing through the locks. And after this 

outing eighty-four of these writers somehow or other managed 

nonetheless to worm their way out of participating in Gorky's 

collective work (though perhaps they wrote their own admiring 

verses and essays), and the remaining thirty-six constituted an 

authors' collective. By virtue of intensive work in the fall and 

winter of 1933 they created this unique book. 

This book was published to last for all eternity, so that future 

generations would read it and be astounded. But by a fateful coincidence, 

most of the leaders depicted in its photographs and 

glorified in its text were exposed as enemies of the people within 

. two or three years. Naturally all copies of the book were thereupon 

removed from libraries and destroyed. Private Q~ners also 

11. Anguished by the vanity of authorship, he. also wrote his own individual 

booklet about the Belomor Canal. 


destroyed it in 1937, not wishing to earn themselves a term for 

owning it. And that is why very few copies have remained intact 

to the present; and there is no hope that it may be reissued-and 

therefore all the heavier is the obligation to my fellow countrymen 

I feel on my shoulders not to permit the principal ideas and 

facts described in this book to perish. It would be only just, too, 

to preserve the names of the authors for the history of literature. 

Well, these at least: M. Gorky, Viktor Shklovsky, Vsevolod 

Ivanov, Vera Inber, Valentin Katayev, Mikhail Zoshchenko, 

Lapin and Khatsrevin, L. Nikulin, Komeli Zeliilsky, Bruno Yasensky 

(the chapter "Beat the Class Enemy to Death!"), Y. Gav 

~hcivolir A. Tikhonov, Aleksei Tolstpi, K. Finn. 

Gorky explained in the following way why this book was necessary 

to the prisoners who had built the canal: "The Canal 

Army Men 12 do not have the necessary vocabulary to express the 

complex feelings of reforging"-and writers do have this vocabulary, 

so they will help. He explained as follows why the book 

was necessary for the writers: "Many writers after becoming 

acquainted with the canal . . . got 'charged up' as a result, and 

this, has had a very positive impact on their work .... A mood is 

going to appear in literature which will push it ahead and put it 

on the level of our great deeds" (My italics-A.S. And this is a\ 

level still palpable in Soviet literature today). And why the book 

was necessary to its millions of readers (many of them were soon 

to flow to the Archipelago themselves) requires no elaboration. 

What was the point of view of the ~uthors' collectiye on the 

subject? First of all: certainty as to the justice of all sentences and 

the guilt of all those driven to work- on the canal. Even the word 

"certainty" is too weak: for the authors this question is out of 

bounds not ,only for discussion but even for mention. Ris as 

clear to them as the fact that night is darker than day. Using 

their vocabulary and their imagery to' insttl1 ,in us all the misanthropic 

legend of the tbjrties, they interpret the word "wrecker" 

as the basis of the engineers' being. Agronomists who spoke 

out against early sowing (maybe in snow and mud?) and irrigation 

experts who provided Central Asia with water~al were 

indqbitable wreckers to them. In every chapter of the book these 

12. It was decided to call them this in order to raise morale (or perhaps in 

honor of the labor army which was never created).

The Archipelago Metastasizes ~ 83 

writers speak only with condescemionof engineers as a class, as 

of a foul, low breed. On page 125 the book accuses a significant 

segment of the Russian. prerevolutionary engineering profession 

of swindling. And this is not an individual accusation, not at all. 

(Are we to understand that engineers were even engaged in 

wrecking Tsarism?) And this was written by people of whom 

not one was capable of extracting even the simplest square root 

(which eVClt GCrtaiD horses do ill circuses). 

The authOfS repeat to us all the nightmare rumors of those 

years as historical gospel truth: that workers were poisoned with 

arsenic in factory dining rooms; that it is not just a piece of 

stupid carelessness if milk from the cow on '8 state farm went 

sour, but an enemy's stratagem to compel the country to swell 

up from starvation (and that's exactly how they write). In indefinite 

and faceless terms they write about that sinister collective 

kulak who went to work in a factory and threw a bolt into 

the lathe. Well, after all, they are oracles of the human heart, and 

it is evidently easier for them to imagine this: a person has ~anaged 

by some miracle to avoid exile to the tundra, has escaped 

to the city, and by some still greater miracle has managed to get 

work in a factory when he is already. dying of hunger, and at 

this point, instead of feeding his family, he throws a bolt into the 

lathe! . 

Then, on the other side, the authors cannot and do not wish 

to restrain their admiration for the leaders of the canal wor~, 

those employers whom they stubbornly call Chekists, although 

it is already the thirties, thereby forcing us to use the name too. 

They admired not only their minds, their wills, their organization, 

but also them-in the highest human sense, as surprising 

beings. Indicative was the episode with Yakov Rappoport. (See 

lllustration No. 12: he does not look to be stupid.) This student 

at Dorpat University, who failed to complete the course there, 

was evacuated to Voronezh, where he became the Deputy·Chairman 

of the Provincial Cheka in his new homet.nd, and then 

Deputy Chief of Construction at Belomorstroi. In the words 

of the authors, Rappoport, while on ail inspection tour of the 

construction site, was disatisfi~ with the way the workers were 

pushing their wheelbarrows along, and he posed an annihilating 

question to the engineer in charge: Do you remember what the 

cosine of 45 degrees is equal to? And the engineer was crushed 


and put to ,shame by Rappoport's erudition,!8 and immediately 

made corrections in his instructions aimed at wrecking, and the , 

movement of the wheelbarrows immediately moved onto a high 

technological level. And with such anecdotes as these the authors 

not only enrich their exposition artistically but also 'lift us 

onto scientific heights! - 

And the higher the post occupied by the employer, the greater 

the worship with which he is described by the authors. Unrestrained 

praises are lavished on the Chief of Gulag, Matvei Berman* 

(Illustration No. 13).14 Much enthusiastic praise is also 

lavished on Lazar Kogan (Illustration No. '14), a former Anarchist 

who in 1918 went over to the side of the victorious 

Bolsheviks, and who proved his loyalty in the post 'of Chief of 

the Special Branch of the Ninth Army, then as Deputy Chief of 

the Armies of the OGPU, and was one of the organizers of Gulag 

and then became Chief of Construction of the Belomor Canal. 

And it is even more the case that the authors caD. only endorse 

COIIJ!llde Kogan's words about the iron commissar: "Comrade 

YagQ.da is our chief, our constant leader." That is what more 

than anything doomed this book! The glorification of Genrikh 

Yagoda was tom out, together with his'portrait, from even that 

one copy of the book which survived for us, and we had to 

search a long time in order to find this portrait of him (Ilustra~ 

tion No. 15). 

This same tone permeated the camp leaflets even more strongly. 

Here, for example: "The honored guests, Comrades Kaganovich, 

Yagoda, and Berman, arrived at Lock No.3. (Their portraits 

hung in every barracks.) People worked more quickly. Up above 

they smiled-and their smile .was transmitted to hundreds of 

people down in the excavation. "l~ And in officially inspired songs: 

Yagoda,in person leads and teaches us, 

Keen is his eye, and his hand is strong. 

13. And Rappoport got the meaning of the cosine all wrong. (Belomorsko- < 

Baltiisky Kanal, op. cit., p._ 10.) 

14. M. Berman-M .. Bormann; once again there is only a one- or two-letter 

difference. Remember Eichmans and Eichmann. , 

' 

IS. Y. Kuzemko. 3-i Shlyuz (The Third Lock), KVO Dmitlag Publishers. 

1935. "Not to be distributed beyond the boundaries of the camp." Because of 

the rarity of this edition. we can recommend another combination: "Kaganovich. 

Yagoda and Khrushchev inspect camps on the Belomor Canal," in D. D. 

Runes, Despotism, New YOfk, 1963, p. 262. , ,


• 

Their general enthusiasm for the camp way of life led the 

authors of the collective work to this panegyric: "No matter to 

what corner of the Soviet Union fate should take us, even if it 

be the most remote wilderness and backwoods, the imprint of 

order . . . of precision and of conscientiousness . . . marks each 

OGPU organization." And what OGPU organization eltists in 

the Russian backwoods? Only the camps. The camp as a torch 

0/ progress-that is the level of this historical source of ours. 

The editor in chief has something to say about this himself. 

Addressing the last rally of Belomorstroi officials on August 25, 

1933, in the city of Dmitrov (they had already moved over t.o 

the Moscow-Volga Canal project), Gorky said: "Ever since 

1928 I have watched how the GPU re-educates people." (And 

what this means is that even before his visit to Solovki, even 

before that boy was shot, ever since,. in fact, he first returned 

to the Soviet Union, he had been watching them.) And by then 

hardly able to restrain his tears, he addressed the Chekists present: 

"You devils in woolen overeoats, you yourselves don't 

know what you have done." And the authors note: the Chekists 

there merely smiled. (They knew what they.had done .... ) And 

Gorky noted the extraordinary modesty of the Chekists in the 

book itself. (This dislike of theirs for publicity was truly a touch- . 

ing trait.) 

The collective authors 40 not simply keep silent about the 

deaths on the Belomor Canal during construction. They do not 

follow the cowardly recipe of hal/-truths. Instead, they write directly 

(page 190) that no one died during construction. (Probably 

they calculated it this way: One hundred thousand stinted . 

. the canal and one hundred thousand finished. And that meant 

they were all alive. They simply forgot about the prisoner transports 

devoured by the construction in the course of two fierce 

. winters. But this is already on the ~evel of the cosine of the 

cheating engineering profession.) 

The.authors see nothing more inspiring than this camp labor. 

They find in forced labor one of the highest forms of blazing. 

conscientious creativity. Here is the theoretical basis of re-education: 

"Criminals are the result of the repulsive conditions of 

former times, and our country is beautiful, powerful and generous, 

and it needs to be beautified." In their opinion all those 

driven to work on the canal would never have found their- paths 


in life if the employers had " not assignecl them to unite the White 

Sea with the Baltic. Because, after all, MHuman raw material is 

immeasurably more difficult to work than wood." What language! 

What profundity! Who said that? Gorky said it in his book, disputing 

the "verbal trumpery of humanism." And Zoshchenko, 

with profound insight, wrote: "Reforging-this is not the desire 

to serve out one's term and be freed [So such suspicions did 

exist?-AS.], but is in actual fact a restructuri'ng of the cons~ensuoics 

and the pride of a builder." What a student of man! 

Did you ever push a canal wheelbarrow-and on a penalty ration 

too? 

This worthy book, constituting the glory of Soviet literature, 

will be our guide in our judgments about the canal. 

How did it happen that the Belomor Canal in particular was 

selected as the first great construction project of the Archipelago? 

Was Stalin forced to this by some kind of exacting economic or 

military necessity? Looking at the results' of the construction; we 

can answer with assurance that there was none. Was he thus inspired 

by his spirit of noble rivalry with Peter the Great, who had 

dragged his fleet over portages along the same route, or with the 

Emperor Paul, in whose reign the first project for such a canal. 

originated? It seems unlikely the Wise Man had ever even known 

of this. Stalin simply needed a great construction project somewhere'which 

would devou~ many working hands and many lives 

(the surplus of people as a result of the liquidation of the kulaks) , 

with the reliability of a gas execution van but more cheaply, and 

which would at the same time leave a great monument to his reign 

of the same general sort as the pyramids. In his favorite slaveowning 

Orient-from which Stalin derived almost- everything in his 

Iife>-they loved to build great "canals." And I can almost see 

him there, examining with love the map of the North of European 

Russia, where the largest part of the camps were already situated 

at that time. And down the center of this region the Sovereign 

drew a line from sea to sea with the end of his pipe stem. 

In proclaiming this project-it had to "be proclaimed neceSsarily 

as urgent. Because in thO$Cl years nothing which was not urgent 

got done in our country. If it had not been urgent, no one would 

have believed in its vital importance, and even the prisoners, dying 

beneath the upturned wheelbarrows, had to believe in that


importance. Because if it had not been urgent, then they would 

not have been willing to die off and clear the way for the new 

society. 

''The canal must be built in a short time and it must be built 

'cheaply! These were Comrade St~lin's instructions." (And everyone 

who was alive then remembers what the orders of Comrade 

Stalin meant!) Twenty months!, That was the time the Great 

Leader allotted his criminals both for the canal and for their own 

correction: from September, 1931, to April, 1933. He was in 

such a rush he would not even give them two full years. One 

hundred and forty miles. Rocky soil. An area abounding in boulders. 

·Swamps. Seven locks in the Povenets "st~rcase," twelve 

locks on the descent to the Wllite Sea. And "this was no Dneprostroi, 

which was allowed a long time for completion and allotted 

foreign exchange. Belomorstroi was entrusted to .the OGPU and 

received not one kopeck in foreign exchanger' 

So the plan looms more and more clearly: This canal was so 

. badly needed by Stalin and the nation that it was not to get one 

kopeck of foreign exchange. Lei a hundred thoUsand prisoners 

work for you simultaneously-what capital is more precious? 

And deliver the canal in twenty months! Not one day later. 

That's when you rant and rage at the wrecker engineers. The 

engineers say: "We will m~ the structure of concrete," The 

Chekists reply: "There is not enough time." The engineers say: 

"We, need large quantities of iron." The Chekists reply: "Replace 

it with wood!" The engineers say: "We need tractors, cranes, 

construction machinery!" The Chekists: "There will be none of 

that, not one kopeck of foreign exchange: do it all by hand." 

The book calls this "the bold Chekist formulation of a technical 

assignment. "18 In other words, the Rappoport cosine. 

We were in such a rush that we brought in people from Tashkent 

for this northern project, hydrotechnologists 'and irrigation 

experts (arrested, as it happened, at the most opportune time). 

With them a Special (once again special, a favorite word!) Design 

Bureau was set up on Furkasovsky Lane (behind the Big Lubyanka).17 

(Incidentally, the Chekist Ivanchenko 'asked the en- 

16. Belomorskti-Baltiisky Kanal, op. cit., p. 82. 

17. This was thus one of the very earliest sharashkas, Islands of Paradise. 

At the same time people mention one other like it: the OKB-the Special Design 

Bureau-at the Izhora ,Factory which designed the first famous blooming 

mill for semifinished steel ingots. 

88 I THB GULAG .ARCHIPBLAGO 

gineer Zhurin: ''Why should you make a plan when there already 

is a plan for the Volga-Don Canal project? Use it instead.") 

We were in such a rush that they were put to work making a 

plan before surveys had been made on the ground. Of course we 

rushed survey crews into Karelia. But not one of the designers 

was allowed to leave even the bounds of the design office, let alone 

go to Karelia (this was vigilance). And therefore telegrams flew 

back and forth! What kind of an elevation do you have there? 

What kind of soil? 

We were in such a rush that trainloads of zeks kept on ar~ 

riving and arriving at the canal site before there were any barracks 

there, or supplies, or tools, or. a precise plan. And what was to 

be done? (There were no barracks, but there was an early northern 

autumn. There were no tools, but the first month of the twenty 

was already passing.) 18 

We were in such a rush that thl? engineers who finally arrived 

at the canal site had no drafting papers, no rulers, no-tltumbtacks 

(I), and not even any light in their work barracks. They worked 

under kerosene wick lamps, and our authors rave that it was just 

like during the Civil War. 

In the jolly tone of inveterate merrymakers they tell us: Women 

came in silk dresses and were handed a wheelbarrow on the spot! 

And "how many, many encounters there were with old acquaintances 

in Tunguda: former students, Esperantists, c.omrades in 

arms from White Guard detachments!" The comrades in arms 

from the White Guard detachments had long since encountered 

each other on Solovki, but we are grateful to the authors for the 

information that Esperantists and students also got their White 

Sea Canal wheelbarrows! Almost choking with laughter, they tell 

us: From the Krasnovodsk camps in Central Asia, from Stalinabad, 

from Samarkand, they brought Turkmenians and Tadzhiks 

in their Bukhara robes and turbans-here to the Karelian subzero 

winter cold! Now that was something the Basmachi rebels never 

expected! The norm here was to break up two and a half cubic 

yards of granite and to move it a distance of a hundred yards in a 

wheelbarrow. ·And the snow kept falling and covering everything 

up, and the wheelbarrows somersaulted off the gangways into the 

snow. Approximately like this (illustration No. 16). 

I 

18. Plus several hidden-tukhta--months of the preliminary organizational 

period not reported anywhere.


But let the authors themselves speak:· "The wheelbarrow tottered 

on the wet planks and turned upside down."lD "~ human 

being with such a wheelbarrow was like a horse in shafts."2°"It 

took an hour to load a wheelbarrow like this"-and not even with 

granite, merely with frozen soil. Or a more generalized picture: 

"The ugly depression, powdered over with snow, was full of people 

and stones. People wandered about, tripping over the stones. 

They bent over, two or three of them together, and, taking hold 

of a boulder, tried to lift it. The boulder did not move. They 

called a fourth and a fifth." But at this point the technology of 

our glorious century came to their aid: "They dragged the boulders 

out of the excavation with a net"-the net being hauled by 

a cable, and the cable in tum by "a drum being turned by a 

horse"! Or here is another method they used: wooden cranes for 

lifting stones (lllustration No. 17). Or here, for example, are 

some of the first Belomorstroi machines (lllustration No. 18). 

And are these your wreckers? No, the~e are engine.ering 

geniuses! They were hurled from the twentieth century into the 

age of the caveman-and, 10, they managed to cope with the 

situation! 

The basic transportation at Belomorstroi consisted of grabarki, 

dray carts, with boxes· mounted on them for carrying earth, as 

we learn from the book. And in addition there were also Belomor 

. Fords! And here is what they were: heavy wooden platforms 

placed on four wooden logs (rollers), and two horses dragged 

this Ford along and carried stones away on it. And a wheelbarrow 

was handled by a team of two men-on slopes it was caught and 

pulled upward by a hookman-a worker using a hook. And how 

were trees to be felled if there were neither saws nor axes? Our 

inventiveness could find the answer to that one: ropes were tied 

around the trees, and they were rocked back and forth by brigades 

pulling in different directions-they rocked the trees out. Our 

inventiveness can solve any proble~ at all-and why? Because 

the canal was being built on the initiative and instructions of 

Comrade Stalin! This was written in the newspapers and repeated 

on the radio every day. 

Just picture this battlefield, with the Cheldsts "in long ashy- 

19. Belomorsko-Baltiisky Kanal, op. cit., p. 112. 

20. Ibid., p. 113. 

16. A work detail 

17. The wooden cranes 

18. The earliest machinery


gray greatcoats or leather jackets." There were only thirty-seven 

of them for a hundred thousand prisoners, but they were loved 

by all, and this love caused· Karelian boulders to move. Here 

they have paused for a moment (illustration No. 19), Comrade 

Frenkel points with his hand, and Comrade Firin chews on his 

lips, and Comrade Uspensky says nothing (and is this that patricide? 

that same Solovki butcher?). And thereby were decided the 

fates of thousands of people during that frosty night or the whole 

of that Arctic month. 

The very grandeur of this construction project consisted in the 

fact that it was carried out without contemporary technology and 

equipment and without any supplies from the nation as a whole! 

"These are not the tempos of noxious European-American capitalism,' 

these are socialist tempos!" the authors brag. 21 (In the 

1960's we will learn that this is called ..• the "Great Leap Forward.") 

The whole book praises specifically the backwardness of 

the technology and the homemade workmanship. There were no 

'cranes? So they will make their own-wooden "derricks." And 

the only metal parts the "derricks" had were in places where there 

was friction-and these parts they cast . themselves. "Oui own 

industry at the canal," our authors gloat., And they themselves 

cast wheelbarrow wheels in their own homemade cupola furnace. 

The country required the canal so urgently and in such haste 

that it could not even find.any wheelbarrow wheels for the project! 

It would have been too difficult an order for I:-eningrad factories. 

No, it would be, unjust, most unjust,-unfair, to compare this 

most savage construction project of the'twentieth century, this 

continental canal built "with wheelbarrow and pick," with the 

Egyptian pyramids; after all, the pyramids were built with, the 

contemporary technology!! And we used the technology of forty 

centuries earlier! 

That's what our gas execution van consisted of. We didn't have 

any gas for the gas chamber. 

Just try and be an engineer in these,circumstances! All the 

dikes were earthen; all the floodgates were made of wood. Earth 

leaks now anc:i_ then. How can it be made watertight? They drive 

horses over the dikes with rollers! (Stalin and the country were 

pitiless to horses as well as to prisoners;.--because horses were a 

kulak animal and ,also destined to die.) It is also very difficult to 

21. Ibid., p. 3'6. 

92 i' THE GULA,G ARCHIPELAGO 

eliminate leakage at contact points between earth and wood. 

Wood had to be used in place of iron! And engineer Maslov invented 

rhomboid wooden lock gates. There was no concrete used 

in the walls of the locks. And how could they be strengthened? 

They remembered the ancient Russian device called "ryazhi" 

cribs of logs fitted and joined, rising fifty feet high and filled with 

soil. Make use of the technology of the caveman, but bear responsibility 

according to the rules of the twentieth century: if it 

leaks anywhere, "Off with your head!" 

The Iron Commissar Yagoda wrote to Chief Engineer Khrustalyev: 

"On the basis of available reports [i.e., from stoolies and 

from Kogan-Frenkel-FiriJ;l] you are not manifesting and you do 

not feel the necessary energy and interest in the work. I order you 

to answer immediately: do you intend immediately [what language!] 

... to set to work in earnest ... and to compel that portion 

of the engineers [what portion? whom?] which is sabotaging 

and interfering with the work to work conscientiously? ... " Now , 

what could the chief engineer reply to that? He wanted to survive. 

"I admit my criminal softness ... I repent of ,my own slackness. 

" , 

And meanwhile it is incessantly dinned into our ears: "The 

canal is being built on the initiative and orders of Comrade 

Stalin!" "The radio in the barracks, on the canal site, by the 

stream, in a Karelian hut, on a truck, the radio which sleeps neither 

day nor night Gust' imagine it!], those innumerable black 

mouths, those black masks without eyes [imagery!] cry out incessantly: 

what do the Chekists of the whole country think about 

the canal project, what does the Party have to say about it?" And 

ypu, too, better think the same! You, too, better think the same! 

"Nature we will teach-and freedom we will reach." Hail socialist 

competition and the sho,ck-worker movement. Competition between 

work brigades! Competition between phalanxes (from 250 

to 300 persons)! Competition between labor collectives! Competition 

between locks! And then, finally, the Vokhrovtsy-the 

Militarized Camp Guarcls--,-entered into competi9on with the 

zeks.l!!! (And the obligation of the Vokhrovtsy? To guard you 

better.) 

But the main reliance was, of course, on the socially friendly 

22. Ibid., p. 153.


elements-in other words, the thieves! These concepts had already 

merged at the canal. Deeply touched, Gorky shouted' to 

them from the rostrum: "After all, any capitalist steals more than 

all of you combined!" The thieves roared with approval, flattered. 

"And big tears glistened in the eyes of a former pickpocket."28 

They counted on being able to make use of the lawbreakers' romanticism 

in the construction. And why shouldn't the thieves 

have been flattered? A thief says from the presidium of the rally: 

"We didn't receive any bread for two days, but there was nothing 

awful in that for us. [After all, they could always plunder someone 

else.] What is precious to us is that people talk to us like 

human beings [which is something the engineers cannot boast of]. 

There are such crags in our path that the- drills break. That's all 

right. We manage them." (What do they. manage them with? 

And who manages them?) 

This is class theory: friendly elements against alien elements as 

the basis of the camp. It has never been reported how brigadiers 

at Belomor ate; but at Berezniki an eyewitness (I.D.T.) says 

there was a separate kitchen for the brigadiers (all ... thieves) 

and rations-better than in the army. So that their fists would get 

strong and they would know for what to put the squeeze on. 

At the second camp there was thievery, grabbing dishes from 

the prisoners and also ration tickets for gruel, but the thieves were 

not expelled from the ranks of shock workers on that account; it 

did not cast a shadow on their social image, or their productive 

drive. They brought the food to the work sites cold. They stole 

clothes from the drivers-:-that was all right, we'll manage. 

Povenets was a penalty site--chaos and confusion. They baked 

no bread in Povenets but brought it all the way fromKem (look 

at the map!). On the Shizhnya sector the food norm was not provided, 

it was cold in the barracks, there was an infestation of lice, 

and people were ill-never mind, we'll manage! "The canal is 

being constructed on the initiative of ... " KVB's--Cultural and 

Educational Battle Points!-were everywhere. (A hooligan no 

more than arrived in camp than he immediately became an instructor.) 

An atmosphere of constant battIe alert was' created. 

AIl of a sudden a night of storm assault was proclaimed-a blow 

against bureaucracy! And right at the end of the evening work the 

cultural instructors. went around the administration rooms and 


19. Frenkel, Firin, and Uspensky. 

20. Distributi?n of. the food bonus 

23. Y. Kuzemka, op. cit.


took by storm! All of a sudden there was a breakthrough (not of 

water, of percentages) on the Tunguda sector. Storm attack! It 

was decided: to double the work norms! Really!24 All of a sudden, 

without any warning, some brigade or other has fulfilled its day's 

plan by 852 percent! Just try to understand that! So a universal 

day of records is proclaimed! A blow against tempo interrupters. 

Bonus pirozhki are distribut:ed to a brigade (Illustration No. 20). 

Why such haggard faces? The longed-for moment-but no gladness 

... 

It seemed that everything was going well. In the summer of 

1932 Yagoda, the provider, inspected the entire route and was 

satisfieg. But in December he sent a telegram: The norms are not 

being fulfilled. The idle loafing of thousands of people must be 

ended. (This you believe! This yo\!. see!) The labor collectives 

are dragging their way to work with faded banners. It has been 

learned that, according to the communiques, 100 percent of the 

total amount of earth to be moved to build the canal has already 

been excavated several times over-yet the canal .has not been 

finished. Negligent sloggers have been filling the log cribs with 

ice instead of stone and earth! And this will melt in the springand 

the water will break through. There are new slogans for the 

instructors: "Tufta 25 is .the most dangerous weapon of counterrevolution;" 

(And it was the thieves most of all who engaged in 

"tufta"; filling the cribs with ice was, plainly, their trick.) And 

there wl:)s one more slogan: "The. cheater is a class enemyf' And 

the thieves were entrusted with the task of going around to expose 

"tufta" and verity the work done by KR brigades! (The best way 

for them to claim as their own the work of the KR brigades.) 

"Tufta" is an attempt to destroy the entire corrective-labor policy 

of the OGPU-that's how awful this "tufta" is! "Tufta" is the 

theft of socialist property! That's how terrible that "tufta" is! In 

February, 1933, they rearrested engineers who had been released 

early-because of the "tufta" they'd discovered. 

There was such elan, such enthusiasm, so whence had come 

this "tufta"? Why had the prisoners thought it up? Evidently they 

were betting on the restoration of capitalism. Things hadn't gone 

that way here without the White emigration's black hand being 

present.· 

At the beginning of 1933 there was a new order from Yagoda: 

24. Belomorsko-Baltiisky Kanal, op. cit., p. 302. 

25. I accept "f" in "tufta" here instead of "kb" ooly because I am quoting. 

?6 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

All administrations were to be renamed staffs 0/ battle sectors! 

Fifty percent of the administrative staffs were to be thrown into 

construction work (would there be enough spades?). They were 

to work in three shifts (the night was nearly polar)! They would 

be fed right on canal site (with cold food)! For "tufta" they 

would be put on trial. 

In January came the storm 0/ the w...atershed! All the phalanxes, 

with their kitchens and property, were to be thrown into one 

I single sector! There were not enough tents for everyone. They 

slept out on the snow-never mind. We'll manage! The canal 

is being built on the initiative of ... 

F;rom Moscow came Order No.1: ''To proclaim a general 

storm attack until the completion of construction." At the end of 

the working day they drove stenographers, office workers, laundresses 

onto the canal site. 

In February there was a prohibition on all visits from relatives 

for the entire Belomor Camp system~ither because of the danger 

of typhus or else because of pressure on the zeks. . 

In April there was an incessant forty-eight-hour storm assault 

-hurrah! Thirty thousand people did not sleep! 

And by May 1, 1933, People's Commissar Yagoda reported 

to his beloved Teacher that the canal had been completed on 

time (nlustration No. 21: map of the canal) . 

.In July, 1933, Stalin, Voroshilov, and Kirov undertook a pleasant 

excursion on a steamer to inspect the canal. There is a photograph 

that shows them sitting on deck in wicker armchairs, 

"joking, laughing, smoking." (Meanwhile Kirov was already 

doomed but did not know it.) 

In August the 120 writers mace their excursion through the 

canal. 

. There were no people in the area to service and operate the 

canal. And so they sent dispossessed kulaks ("special deportees"), 

and Berman himself picked the places for their settlements. 

A large part of the "Canal Army Men" went on to build the 

next canal-the Moscow-Volga Canal.26 

26. At the August rally of the Canal Army Men Lazar Kogan proclaimed: 

"Not fur oft' is the rally which will be the last in the camp system .••• Not far 

oft' i~ that year. month and day when by and large corrective-labor camps will 

not be needed." He himself was probably shot. and never did find out bow 

sadly mistaken he was. And maybe when he said it, he did not believe it.

98 I· THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

\. 

+-++-+ Railroads m:mn Other canals 0..... __..... 

60~1'-_o km 

21. Map of the Belomor Canal 

Let us turn away from the scoffing collective writers' volume. 

No matter how gloomy the Solovetsky Islands seemed, the 

Solovetsky Islanders who were sent off on prisoner transports to 

end their terms (and often their lives) on the Belomor Canal 

only there really came to feel that joking had ended, only there 

discovered what a genuine camp was like, something which all of 

us gradually came to know later. Instead of the quiet of Solovki, 

there were incessant mother oaths and the savage din of quarreling 

mingled with indoctrinational propaganda. Even in the 

,barracks of the Medvezhyegorsk Camp in the Administration of 

BelBaltlag people slept on "vagonki"-double-tiered wooden 

bunks anchored in pairs (already invented), not just by fours but 

by eights, two on each single bunk panel-head by feet. Instead of 

stone monastery buildings; there were drafty temporary barracks, 

even tents, and sometimes people out on the bare snow. And those 

transferred from Berezniki, where they had also worked a twelvehour 

day, found it was worse here. Days of work records. Nights 

of storm assaults. "From us everything, to us nothing." Many 

were crippled and killed in the crowding and chaos in the course 

of dynamiting rocky crags. Gruel that had grown cold was eaten 

among the boulders. We have already read what the work was 

like. What kind of food-well, what kind could there have been 

in 1931-1933? (Anna Skripnikova reports that even in the 

Medvezhyegorsk mess hall for free voluntary employees they 

served only a murky dishwater with fish heads and individual 

millet grains.)27 Their clothing was their own and was worn till 

it was worn out. And there was on(y one form of address, one 

form of urging them on, one refrain: "Come on! ... Come on! 

... Come on! ... " , 

They say that in the first winter, 1931-1932, 100,000 died off 

-a number equal to'the'number of those who made up the full 

working force on the canal. And why not believe it? More likely 

it is an understatement: in similar conditions in wartime camps 

, a death rate of one percent per day was commonplace and common 

knowledge. So on Belomor 100,000 could have died off in 

27, However, she recalls that refugees from the Ukraine came to Medvezhyegorsk 

in order to get work near the camp and by this means save themselves 

from starvation, The zeks called them over and brought some of their own food 

from the camp compound tor them to eat. And all this is very likely. But not 

all were able to escape from the Ukraine.

The Archipelago Metastasizes I 99· 

just three months plus. And then there was another whole summer, 

and another winter. 

D. P. Vitkovsky, a Solovetsky Islands veteran, who worked 

on the White Sea Canal as a work supervisor and saved the lives 

of many prisoners with that very same "tukhta," the falsification 

of work reports, draws a picture of the evenings: 

At the end of the workday there were corpses left on the work site. 

The snow powdered their faces. One of them was hunched over beneath 

an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his 

sleeves and frozen to death in that position. Someone had frozen with 

his head bent down between his knees. Two were frozen back to back 

leaning against ·each other. They were peasant lads and the best 

workers one could possibly imagine. They were sent to the canal in 

tens of thousands at a time, and the authorities tried to work things 

out so no one got to the same subcamp as his father; they tried to 

break up families. And right off they gave them norms of shingle and 

boulders that you'd be unable to fulfill even in summer. No one was 

able to teach them anything, to warn them; and in their village simplicity 

they gave all their strength to their work and weakened very 

swiftly and then froze to . death, embracing in pairs. At night the 

sledges went out and collected them. The drivers threw the corpses 

onto the sledges with a dull clonk. 

And in the summer bones remained from corpses which had not 

be.en removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into 

the concrete mixer. And in. this way they got into the concrete of the 

last lock at the city of Belomorsk and will b~ preserved there forever.28 

The Belomorstroi newsRaper choked with enthusiasm in desclibing 

how many Canal Army Men,·who had been "aesthetically 

carried away" by their great task, had in their own free time 

(and, obviously, without any payment in bread) decorated the 

canal banks with stones-simply for the sake of beauty. 

Yes, and it was quite right for them to set forth on the banks of 

the canal the names of the six principal lieutenants of Stalin and 

Yagoda, the.chief overseers of Belomor, six hired murderers each 

of whom accounted for thirty thousand lives: Firin-Berman 

Frenkel-Kogan-Rappoport-Zhuk. 

Yes, and they should have added there the Chief of VOKhR of 

Bemaltlag-Brodsky. Yes, and the Curator of the Canal representing 

VTslK-Solts. 

28. D. Vitkovsky, Polzhizni (Half a Lifetime). 


Yes, and all thirty-seven Chekists who were at the canal. And 

the thirty-six writers who glorified Belomor. 2o And the dramatist 

Pogodin should not be forgotten either. 

So that tourists on steamers would read and think about them. 

But that's the rub. There are no tourists! 

How.can that be? 

Just like that. And there are no steamers either. There is nothing 

there that goes on a schedule. 

In 1966, when I was completing this book, I wanted to travel 

through the great Belomor, to see it for myself. Just so as to 

compete with those 120 others. But it was impossible .... There 

was nothing to make the trip on. I would have had to ask for 

passage on a freighter. And on such vessels they check your 

papers. And I have a name which had been attacked. There would 

immediately be suspicion: Why was I going? And, therefore, so 

that the book remained safe, it was wiser not to go. 

,t~B nonetheless, I did poke around there a bit. First at Medvezhyegorsk. 

J:!ven at the present time many of the barracks have 

still survived. Also a majestic hotel with a five-story glass tower. 

For after all, this was the gateway to the canal! After all, things 

would buzz here with Soviet and foreign visitQrs .... But it stayed 

empty forever and ever, and finally they turned it over to a boarding 

school. .-/ 

The road to' Povenets. Stunted woods. Stones at every step. 

Boulders. 

From Povenets I reached 'the canal straightaway and walked 

along it for a long stretch, keeping as close as possible to the 

locks so as to look them over. Forbidden zones. Sleepy guards. 

But in some places things were' clearly visible. The walls of the 

locks were just what they had been before, made from those very 

same rock-filled cribs. I could ,recognize them from their pictures. 

But Maslov's rhomboid gates bad been rep~aced by metal gates 

and were no longer opened by hand. 

But why was everything so quiet? There were no people about. 

29. Including Aleksei N. Tolstoi, who, after he had traveled over the canal 

(for he had to pay for his position) , "recounted with excitement and inspiration 

what he had seen, drawing attractive, almost fantastic, and at the same 

time realistic pictures of- the prospects of the future of the region, putting into 

, his narrative all the heat of his creative passion and writer's' imagination. He 

literally bubbled with enthusiasm in speakmg of the labor of the canal builders, 

of the advanced technology [my italics--A.S.]."


There was no traffic on the canal nor in the locks. There was no 

hustle and bustle of service personnei. There were no steamer 

whistles. The lock gates stayed shut. It was a fine sereneJ une 

day. So why was it? 

And so it was that I passed five locks of the Povenets "staircase," 

and after passing the fifth I sat down on the baIik:. Portrayed 

on all our "Belomor" cigarette packages, and so desperately 

needed by our country, why are you silent, Great Canal? 

Someone in civilian clothing approached me with watchful 

eyes. So I played the simpleton: Where could I get some fish? 

Yes, and how could I leave via the canal? He turned out to be the 

chief of the locks guard. Why, I asked him, wasn't there any pas~ 

senger traffic? Well-he-acted astonished-how could we? After 

all, the Americans would rush right over to see it. Until the war 

there had been passenger traffic, but not since the war. Well, 

what if they did come and see it? Well, now, how could we let 

them see it? But why is no one traveling on it? They do. But not 

very many. You see, it is very shallow, sixteen feet deep. They 

wanted to rebuild it, but in all probability they will build another 

next to it, one which will be all right from the beginning. 

You don't say, boss! We've long since known all about that: 

In 1934, no sooner had they finished passing out all the medals 

than there was already a project for reconstructing it. And point 

No.1 was: to deepen the clUial. And the second was: to build a 

deep-water chain of locks (or seagoing ships parallel to the existing 

locks. Haste makes waste. Because of that time limit imposed 

on its completion, because of those norms, they not only cheated 

on the depth but reduced the tonnage capacity: there had to be 

some faked cubic feet in order to feed the sloggers. (And very 

soon afterwm:d they blamed this cheating· on the engineers and 

gave them new "tenners.") And fifty miles of the Murmansk Railroad 

had had to be moved to make room for the canal route. It 

was at le~t a good thing that they hadn't wasted any wheelbarrow 

wheels on the project. And what were they to haul on it anyway 

-and where? They had cut down all the nearby timber-so 

:where was it to be hauled from? Was Archangel timber to be . 

hauled to Leningrad? But it was sold right in Archangel; foreigners 

had been buying it there since long ago. Yes, for half the year 

the canal is frozen anyhow,-maybe more. So what was it needed 

for anyway? Oh, yes, there was a military necessity: in order to 

be able to shift the fleet. 

102 THE. GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

"It's so shallow;" complained the chief of the guard, "that not 

even submarines can pass through it under their own power; they 

have to be loaded on barges, and only then can they be hauled 

through." 

And what about the cruisers? Oh, you hermit-tyrant! 'You 

nighttime lunatic! In what nightmare did you dream up all this? 

And where, cursed one, were you hurrying to? What was it that 

burned and pricked you-to set a deadline of twenty months? 

For those quarter-million men could have remained alive. Well, 

so the Esperantists stuck in your throat, but think how much work 

those peasant lads could have done for you! How many times you 

could have roused them to attack-for the Motherland, for 

Stalin! . 

"It was very costly," I said to the guard. 

"But it was built very quickly!" he answered me with self-assurance. 

. Your bones should be in it! 

That day I spent eight hours by the canal. During this time 

there was one self-propelled barge which'passed from Povenets 

to Soroka, and one, identical in type, which passed from Soroka 

to Povenets. Their numbers were different, and it was only by 

their numbers that I could tell them apart and be sure that it 

was not the same one as before on its way back. Because they 

were loaded altogether identically: with the very same pine logs 

which had been lying exposed for a long time and were useless 

for' anything except firewood. 

' 

And canceling the one load against the other we get zero. 

And a quarter of a million to be remembered . 

• 

And after the White Sea-Baltic Canal came the Moscow-Volga 

Canal. The sloggers all moved over to it immediately, as weli as 

Chief of Camp Ficin, and Chief of Construction Kogan. (Their 

Orders of Lenin for Belomor reached both of them there.) 

But this canal was at least needed. And it gloriously continued 

and developed all the traditions of Belomor, and we can understand 

even better here how the Archipelago in the period of rapid 

metastasis differed from stagnant Solovki. Now was the time to


remember and regret the silent cruelties of Solovki. For now 

they not only demanded work of the prisoners, they not only 

demanded that the prisoners break up the unyielding rocks with 

their failing picks. No, while taking away life, they even earlier 

crawled into the breast and searched the soul .. 

And this was the ~ost difficult thing to bear on the canals: 

They demanded that in addition to everything else you chirp. 

You might be on your last legs, but you had to make a pretense. 

of participation in public affairs. With a tongue growing numb 

from hunger you had to deliver speeches demanding overfulfillment 

of plan: and exposure of wreckers! And punishment 

for hostile propaganda, for kulak rumors (and all camp rumors 

were kulak rumors). And to be on the lookout to make sure that 

the snakes of mistrust did not entwine a new prison term about 

you . 

. Picking up these shameless books where the life of the doomed 

is \ portrayed so glossily and with such admiration, it is almost 

impossible to believe that they were written in all seriousness and 

also. read in all seriousness. (Yes, and circumspect Glavlit destroyed 

the printings, so that in this case too we got one of-'the 

last existing copies.) 

And now our Virgil will be the assiduous pupil of Vyshinsky, 

I. L. Averbakh.30 

Even driving in a single screw takes at first some special 

effort: The axis must be kept straight, and the screw has to be 

kept from leaning to one side. But when it has already begun 

to take hold, pne can then free one hand, and just keep screwing 

it in and whistling. 

We read Vyshinsky: "Thanks in particular to its educational 

task, our Corrective Labor Camp (ITL) is fundamen4l11y 

counterposed to the bourgeois prison where raw violence 

reigns."a1 "In contrast to bourgeois states, the use of violence in 

the struggle against crime plays a rdIe of secondary importance, 

and the center of gravity has passed over to organizationalmaterial, 

cultural-educationaI, and poIitical-indoctrinational 

measures."32 (You really have to furrow your brains not to 

burst out: Instead of the club-the ration scale, plus propa- 

30. Averbakh, op. cit. 

31. Vyshinsky's preface to the collection Ot Tyur

_.-- 


Perhaps it is a bit crooked, but are we not losing the capacity to 

resist it? The Father marked a line oil the map with his pipe, and 

is there some anxiety about justifying him? An Averbakh always 

turns up: "Andrei Yanuaryevich, here is an idea I've had. What 

do you think about it? Should I develop it in a book?" 

But those are only f~ls. What was required was that the 

prisoner, while still confined in camp, "be indoctrinated in the 

highest socialist forms of labor." 

And what was required 'for that? The screw had gotten stuck. 

What muddle-headedness! Of course, socialist competition 

and the shock-worker movement! (Illustration No. 22.) )Yhat 

millennium is it, darlings, out of doors? "Not just work, but 

heroic work!" (OGPU Order No. 190.) 

Competition for temporary possession of the red banner of 

the central staff! Of the district staff! Of the division staff! Competition 

between camps, construction sites, brigades! "Along 

with the transferable red banner a brass band was also awarded! 

For whole days at a time it played for the winners during 

work periods and during periods of tasty food!" (Illustration 

No. 26: There is no tasty 'food to be seen in the photograph, 

but you can see the searchlight. That was for night work. 

The Moscow-Volga Canal was constructed around the clock.)84 

In every brigade of prisoners there' was a "troika" concerned 

with competition .. Audit-and resolutions! Resolutions-and 

audit! The results of the storm assault on the watershed for 

the first five-day period! For the second! The intercamp newspaper 

was called Perekovka-Reforging. Its slogan was: "Let 

us drown our past on the bottom of the canal." Its appeal: "Work' 

without days off!" Universal enthusiasm, universal agreement! 

The leading shock worker said: "Of course! How can there be 

days off? The Volga doesn't have . .. days off, and it's just about 

to overflow its banks." And what about days off on the Mississippi? 

Grab him, he's a kulak agent! A point in the obligations 

undertaken: "Preservation of health by every member of the 

34. A band was used in other camps as well: they put it on the shore and it 

played for several days in a row until prisoners working without relief or rest 

periods had unloaded timber from a barge. ID.T. was in a band at Belomor 

and he recalls: The band aroused anger among those working (after all, the 

musicians were released from general work, had their own individual cots and 

their own military uniform). They used to shout at us: "Parasites, drones! 

Come here and get to work!" In the photograph neither this nor anything like 

it is shown. 

106 I T.HE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

collective." Oh, what humanitarianism! No, here's what it was for: 

"to reduce the amount of al)senteeism.',' "Do not be ill, and do not 

take time off." Red bulletin boards. Black bulletin boards. Bulletin 

boards of charts: days remaining until completion; work 

done yesterday, work done today. The honor rolL In every 

barracks, honor certificates, "a bulletin b'oard of reforging" 

(Illustration No. 23), graphs, diagrams. (And how many 

loafers were scurrying about and writing all this stuff!) Every 

prisoner had to be informed about the production plans! And 

every prisoner had to be informed about the entire political life 

. of the country! Therefore 'at morning line-up (taken out of 

moming free time, of course) there was a "five-minute production 

session," and after returning to camp, when one's legs could 

hardly keep one upright, there was a "five-minute political session." 

During lunch JIours prisoners were not to be allowed to 

crawl into nooks and crannies or to sleep-there were "political 

readings."- If out in freedom the "Six Conditions of Comrade 

Stalin" were proclaimed, then every camp inmate had to learn 

them by heart.85 If in freedom there was a decree of the Council 

of People's Commissars ori dismissing. workers for absenteeism, 

then here explanatory work had to be undertaken: Every person 

who today refuse!! to work or who simulates illness must, after his ' 

liberation, be branded with the contempt of the masses of the 

Soviet Union. The system here was this: In order to get the title 

of shock worker it was not enough merely to have production 

successes! It was necessary, in addition: (a) to read the newspapers; 

(b) to love your canal; (C?) to be able to talk about its 

significance. 

And miracle! Oh, miracle! Oh, transfiguration and ascension! 

The "shock worker ceases to feel discipline and labor as something 

which- has been forced on him from outside." (Even horses 

understand this: Illustration No. 24.) "It becomes an inner 

necessity!' (Well, truly,· of course, freedom, after all, is 

not freedom, but accepted bars!) - New socialist forms of 

reward! The issuing of shock workers' buttons. And what 

i 

35. It is worth noting that inteUeclWlls who had managed to make their 

way up to positions in management took advantage of these Six Conditions 

very adroitly. "To make use of specialists by every pOSsible means" meant to 

yank engineers off general work. "Not to permit turnover in the work fo,rce" 

meant to prohibit prisoner transports! ,

22. Barracks posters: 

"Complete the canall" 

23. "For a better life, for a happier life!" 

25. Beneath the storm 

24. "Even the horse 

doesn't need the whip!" 

26. A brass band at the canal


would you.have thought, what would you have thought? "The 

shock worker's button is valued by the sloggers more highly 

than rationsf' Yes, more highly than rations! ~d whole brigades 

"voluntarily go .out to work two hours before line-up." (What 

presump'tion! But what was the convoy to do?) "And they also 

stay¢ behind to work after the end of the workday." 

Oh, flame! Oh, matches! They thought you w:ould bum for 

decades. 

Here it is: shock work! (illustration No. 25.) A thunderstorm 

breaks,but we are going to work anyway! We are going to 

overfulfill'the day's plan! Remark the technology. We spoke 

of it at the Belomor too: ·on the slopes a hookman haulS the 

wheelbarrow from the front-indeed, how else'could it be made 

to roll upward? Ivan Nemtsev suddenly decided to do the work 

of five menlNo sooner said than done: he moved seventy-two 

cubic yards of earth in ane shift. 88 (Let us calculate: that is 

six and a half cubic yards per hour, one cubic yard every nine 

minutes. Just try it, even with the lightest type of $Oil!) ThiswSs 

the situation: there were no pumps, no wells had been readiedand 

water had to be fought off with one's hands!87 And what 

abo_ut the women? They used to lift,unaided, stones of up to 

a hundred and fifty pounds!88 Wheelbarrows overturned and 

stones struck head and feet. That's all right, we'1l1lUJnage! Sometimes 

"up to their waJsts in water," sometimes "sixty-two hours 

of unbroken work," sometimes "for three days five hundred 

persons ha~ed at the frozen earth,", and it turned out to be to no 

avail. That's all right, we'll1lUJnage. 


27. Shock brigade 

With our battle spades 

We dug our happiness near ,Moscowl 

This was that same "speciill, gay tension" they had brought with 

them from Belomor. ''They went on the attack with boisterous gay 

songs." 

In any weather 

March out to Une-upl 

36. Kuzemko, op. cit • 

. 37. Ibid. 

38. The leaflet Kana/oarmeika (The CQIIQ/ Army Woman), Dmitlag, 1935. 

(Not to be taken beyond the boundaries of the campI) 

28. Meeting of a shock brigade


And here are the shock workers themselves (Illustration No. 

27). They have come to the rally. On one side, by the train, is 

the chief of convoy, and on the left there is one more convoy 

guard. Lopk at their inspired and happy faces; these women do 

not think about children nor about home but only about the 

canal which they have come to love so. It is quite cold, and some 

are ,Ut felt boots, some in ordinary boots, homemade of course, 

and the second from the left.in the first row is a woman thief in 

stolen shoes, and where' better to go swaggering about in them 

than at the rally? And here is another rally (Illustration No. 28). 

It says Qn the poster, "We will build it ahead of time, cheaply and 

strong." And how do we reconcile all that? Well, let the engineers 

break their heads over it. It is easy to see in the photograph that 

there are shadows of smiles for the camera, but in general these 

women are terribly fatigued. They are not going to make 

speeches. And all they expect from the rally is a nourishing meal 

for once. All of them have simple peasant-like faces. ao And the 

trusty guard got stuck in the aisle. The Judas, he so much wanted 

to get into that photograph. And here is a shock brigade, pro- 

. vided with the last word in equipment (Illustration No. 30). 

It is not true that we haul everything under our own steam! If we 

are to believe the camp artists whose works were exhibited in the 

KVCh-the Cultural and Educational Section-(Illustrations 

Nos. 29 and 31), then this is the equipment already in use at 

the canal: one excavator, one crane, and one tractor. Are they 

in working order? Perhaps they are broken down; isn't ~t more 

likely? Well, generally speaking, in winter it isn't very cozy Qut 

on the construction site, right? 

There was one small additional' problem: "At the time Belomor 

. was completed too many triumphant articles appeared in various 

newspapers, and they nullified the terroriZing effect of the ~ps. 

. . . In the description of Belomor thE;y, overdid it to such a 

degree that those who arrived at the Moscow-Volga Canal expected 

rivers. of milk and honey- and presented unheard-of 

demands to 'the administration." (Presumably they asked for 

clean linen?) So that was it: Go ahead and lie as much as you 

29. Winter on the canal (painting by camp artist) 

30. Women's sho~k brigade 

39. All these photographs are from Averbakh's book. He warned that there 

were no photographs of kulaks and wreckers in it (in other words, of the finest 

peasants and intellectuals). Evidently, so to speak, "their time has not yet 

come." Alas, it never will. You can't bring back the dead.

the A.rchipelago Metastasizes I' 113 

please, but don't get entangled in your lying. "Today, too, the 

banner of Belomor waves over us," writes the newspaper Reforging. 

That's a moderate statement And it is quite enough. 

In any event, both at Belomor and at the Moscow-Volga Canal 

they understood that "camp competition an4 the shock-worker 

movement must be tied in with the entire system of rewards" so 

that the special rewards would stimulate the shock-worker movement. 

"The principal basis of' competition is material incentive." 

(I?I? It would seem we've, been thrown about-face? We 

have turned from East to West? One hundred eighty degrees? 

Is this a provocation! Hold tight to the handrails! The car is 

going through!) And things worked out like this: On production 

indices depended . . . nutrition and housing and clothing and 

linen and the frequency of baths! (Yes, yes, whoever works 

badly can go about in tatters and lice!) And liberation ahead of 

time! And rest days! And visits! For example, issuing a shock 

worker's lapel button is a purely socialist form of encouragement. 

But let that button confer the right to a long visit out of tum! 

And by this means it becomes more precious than bread rations. 

"If in freedom, in accordance with the Soviet Constitution, we 

apply the principle of whoever does not work does not eat, then 

why should we put the camp inmates in a privileged position?" 

(The most difficult thing in organizing a camp: they must not 

become privileged places!) The ration scale at Dmitlag was this: 

The. penalty ration consisted of muddy water and ten and a half 

ounces of bread. One hundred percent fulfillment of· norm earned 

the right to twenty-eight ounces of bread and the right to buy 

in addition three and a half ounces in the camp commissary. And 

then "submission to discipline begins out of egotistical motives 

(self-interest in gettirig a better bread ration) and rises to the 

second step of socialist self-interest in the red banner."'o 

But the main thing was time oft sentence I Time oft sentence! 

The socialist competition headquarters compiles a report Qn the 

prisoner. For time pft sentence not only overfulfillment of plan 

is required, but also social work. And anyone who in the past 

has been a nonworking element gets reduced time oft sentence, 

miserly small. "Such a person can only pretend, not reform! He 

must be kept in camp longer so as to be verified." (For example, 

31. Winter on the canal (painting) 

32. "Volunteers" 

40. In bis private life Averbakh probably began immediately with the second 

step.

• 

"- fhe Archipelago Metastasizes 115 

he .pushes a wheelbarrow uphilI-and maybe he isn't'working, 

but just pretending?) 

And what d~ those who were freed ahead of time do? What 

do you mean, what? They stay with the project. They have come 

to love the canal too much to leave it! "They are so absorbed 

in it .that when they are liberated they voluntarily stay at the 

canal; engaging in earth-moving operations right to the end of 

the project." (They voluntarily remain at work like that. As, 

for example, in Illustration No. 32. Can one believe the author? 

Of course. After all, they all have a stamp in their passport: 

"Was in OGPU camps." You aren't going to find work anywhere 

else.)41 

But what is this? The machinery for producing nightingale 

trills has suddenly broken down-and in the intermission we 

hear the weary breath of truth: "Even the thieves were only 60 

percent involved in competition. [It is pretty bad if even the 

thieves don't compete!] The camp inmates often interpret the 

special benefits and rewards as incorrectly applied"; "recommendations 

of prisoners are often composed tritely"; "very often 

trusties pass themselves off on recommendations [I] as shock, < 

worker excavators and receive a shock worker's time off sentence 

while the real shock worker often gets none."42 (And so it would 

seem, gentlemen instructors, that it was- you who had not managed 

tO'rise to the second step?); "and there were many [I] who clung 

to feelings of hopelessness and itijustice."48 

But the trills 1!ave. begun again, with a metallic ring. The 

main incentive had evidently been forgotten: "cruel and merciless 

application of disciplinary penalties!" OGPU Order of November 

41. Averbakh, op. cit., p. 164. . 

42. In our country everything is topsy-turvy, and even rewards sometimes 

turn out to be a misfortune. The blacksmith Paramonov received two years 

011 his -ten-year sentence in one of the Archangel camps far the excellence 

of his work. But because of this two-year reduction, he completed lIis term 

during wartime, and as a result, being a S8, he was not released, but was kept 

there "under special decree" (special, once again). Just as soon as the war was 

over Paramonov's codefendants, convicted with him in the same case, completed 

their ten-year sen"nces and were released. And he dragged out another 

whole year. The prosecutor studied his case and couldn't do a thing: "the 

special decree" re_mained in force throughout the entire Archipelago. 

43. Well, and in 1931 the Fifth Conference of Justice Officials condemned 

this whole snakepit: "The widespread and totally unjustified application of 

parole and time 011 sentence for workdays • • • leads to diminution 01 the Impact 

of sentences, to the undermming of the repression of crime, and to dis-. 

tortious in the class line." 


~ 

28, 1933. (This was at the beginning of winter, so they would 

stand still without rocking back and forth!) "All incorrigible 

loafers and malingerers are to be sent to distant northern camps 

with total deprivation of rights to any privileges. Malicious 

strikers and troublemakers are to be turned over to trial by 

camp collegia. For the slightest ~tempt to violate iron discipline 

prisoners are to be deprived of all special privileges and advantages 

already received:" (For example, for attempting to get 

warm beside the fire.) . 

And, nonetheless, we have again omitted the main link-total 

confusion! We have said everything, but we didn't say the main 

thing! Listen! Listen! "Collectivity is both the principle and the 

method of Soviet corrective-labor policy." After all, there have 

to be "driving belts from the administration to the masses!" 

"Only by basing itself on collectives can the multitudinous camp 

administration rework the consciousness of the prisoners:" "From 

the lowest forms of collective responsibility to the highest forms 

is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and 

heroism!" (We often abuse our language, claiming that with the 

passage .of the ages it has grown pale. But if one really thinks 

about this, it is not true! It becomes more noble. Earlier, in the 

manner of cabmen, we said "reins." And now "driving belts"! 

It used to be called "mutual back-scratching": You help me out 

of the ditch and I'll help you out of the swamp-but ·that smells 

of the stable too. And now it's' collective responsibility!) 

"The brigade is the basic furm of re-education." (A DmitIag 

order, 1933.) ''This means trust in the collective, which is impossible 

under capitalism!" (But which is quite possible under 

feudalism: one man in the village is at fault, strip them all and 

whip them! Nonetheless it sounds noble: Trust in the collective!) 

"That means the spoll.taneous initiativ.e of the c~p inmates.in 

the cause of re-education!" ''This is psychological enrichment of 

the personality by the collective!" (No, what words, what words! 

After all, he's knocked us right down with this psychological 

enrichment! Now there's a real scholar for you!) "The collective 

heightens the feeling of human dignity [yes, yes!] of every prisoner 

and by this means hinders the ititroduction of a system of moral 

repression." . 

And, indeed, please tell me: thirty years after Averbakh, it 

was my fate to say a word or so about the brigade-aII I did was


describe how things work there; but people managed to understand 

me in quite the opposite sense, in a distorted way: "The 

brigade is the basic contribution of Communism to the science 

of punishment. [And that is quite right, that is precisely what 

Averbakh is saying.] ... It is a collective organism, living, 

working, eating, sleeping, and suffering together in pitiless and 

forced symbiosis."u 

Oh, without the brigade one could still somehow manage to 

survive the camp! Without the brigade you are an individual, 

you yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the 

brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only 

way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. 

From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from 

the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a 

moment of rest; you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a 

bit there on lifting. But from the driving belts, from your comrades 

in the brigade, there is neither a hiding place, nor salvation, 

nor mercy. You cannot not want to work. You cannot, conscious 

of being a political, prefer death from hunger to work. No! Once 

you have been marched outside the compound, once you have 

been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does 

today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six, and 

because of you the entire brigade's percentage of norm will falI 

from 123 to 119, which makes the


120 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBI AGO 

Or, at the amateur theatricals. bursting from the breast: 

And even the mcist beautiful song , 

Cannot tell, no, cannot do jUstice ' 

To thi&couirtrythan which there is nothing more Wondrous, . 

The country in whlch ;you and I live.40 

Now that is what:to chirp means in camp slang. 

Oh, they will drive you to the point where you 'will weep just 

to be backwi1f! company C01llJWiDder KUrilko. walking along 

the short al'ld simple execution road, through open-and-aboveboardSolovki 

slavery. 

My Lord! What canal -is there deep enough fo~ us to drown 

that past in? . 

33. Labor collective 

And listen to this: "As a preliminary, the task and the purposes 

of the purge were communicated to every camp inmate. And at 

that point every member of the collective gave public accounting."45 

And then, too, there was exposure of fake shock workers! And 

elections of. the cultural council! And official rebukes to those 

who had done poorly at liquidating their illiteracy! And there 

were the classes in liquidation of illiteracy too: "We-are-notslaves!. 

Slaves-we-are-not!" And the songs too? 

This kingdom of swamps and lowlands 

Will become our happy native land. 

Or,in the masterful words of Nikolai Aseyev, the poet him- . 

self: 

We Canal Army Men are a tough people, 

But not in that lies our chief trait; 

We were caught up by a great epoch 

To be put on the path that leads straight. 

45. All the citations not otherwise credited are from Averbakb's book. But 

sometimes I have combined phrases from different places, sometimes passed 

over his intolerable prolixity. After all, he had to stretch it out into a dissertation. 

But we don't have the space. However, I 'have nowhere distorted the 

meaning. 

46. Song books of Dmitlag. 1935. And the music was caUed CtI1Ial Army 

MIIS/C, and there were free compqsers on tbecompetition -committee: Shostll 

. kovich, Kabalevsky, Silekhter. . • • .

122 I' THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Chapter 4 

• 

The Archipelago Hardens 

And the clock of history was striking. 

In 1934, at the January Plenum of the Central Committee and 

. Cen~al Control Commission of the Soviet Communist Party, 

the Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many 

he would soon have to do tlWay with) declared that the withering 

away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920 

on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the ID;aximum intensification 

of state pow.er! , . 

This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to 

every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice, 

immediately pieted it up: "And this means the maximum 

strengthening of. corrective-labor institutions."l 

Enf.rY into socialism via the m8.ximum strengthening of prison! 

And this was not some satirical magazine cracking Ii joke ·either, 

but was said by the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union! And 

thus it was that the iron grip of the Ye.zhov terror was prepared 

even without Yezhov. 

After -all, the Second Five-Year Plan-and who remembers 

this? (for no one in our country ever remembers anything, for 

memory is the Russians' weak spot, especially memory of the 

bad)-the Second Five-Year Plan included among its glisteniJ;lg 

(and to this very day unfulfilled) goals the following: "the up" 

rooting of the vestiges of capitalism from people's consciousness." 

This meant that this process of uprooting had to be finished by 

1. Vyshinsky, op. cit., Preface. 

1938. Judge for yourself: by what means were these vestiges to 

be so swiftly uprooted? 

"Soviet places of confinement on the threshold of the Second 

Five-Year Plan not only are not losing but are even gaining in 

significance." (Not one year had passed since Kogan's prediction 

that camps would soon cease to exist at all. But Kogan did not 

know about the January Plenum!) ~In the epoch of entrance 

into socialism the role of corrective-labor institutions as weapons 

of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as organs of repression, as 

means of compulsion and education [compulsion'is already in 

the first place!] must grow still further and be strengthened."2 

(For otherwise what was to h~pen to the cominand corps of the 

NKVD? Was it just supposed to disappear?) 

So who is going to reproach our Progressive Doctrine with having 

fallen behind practice? All this was printed in black on white, 

but we still didn't know how to read. The year 1937 was publicly 

predicted and provided with a foundation. 

And the hairy hantl tossed out all the frills and gewgaws too. 

Labor collectives? Prohibited! What nonsense was that-selfgovernment 

in camp! You couldn't think up anything better than 

the brigade anyway~ What's all this about political indoctrination 

periods? Forget it! The prisoners are sent there to work and they 

don't have to understand anything. At Ukhta they had proclaimed 

the "liquidation of the last mUltiple bunk"? This was a political 

mistake-were the prisoners to be put to bed on cots with springs? 

Cram them on the bunks twice as thickly! Time of! sentences? 

Abolish that before anything! What do you want-that the court's 

work should go for nothing? And what about those who already 

have credits toward time of!' sentence? Consider them canceled! 

(1937.) They are still permitting visits in some camps? Forbid 

them everywhere. Some prison or other permitted a priest's body 

to be turned over for burial outside prison? You must be insane! 

You are providing an opportunity for anti-Soviet demonstrations. 

There must be an exemplary punishment for this! And make it 

clear: the corpses of deceased prisoners belong to Gulag, and 

the location of graves is top-secret. Professional and technical 

courses for prisoners? Dissolve them! They should have done 

their studying in freedom. And what about VTsIK-what VTsIK 

2. Ibid., p', 449. One of the authors, Apeter, was the new Chief of Gulag. 

121

Th4 Archipelago Hardens I 123 

anyway? Over KaIinin's signature? And we don't have a GPU, 

we have an NKVD. When they return to freedom, let them study 

on their own. Graphs, diagrams? Tear them off the wall and 

whitewash the walls. And you don't,even have to whitewash them. 

, And what kind of payroll is this? Wages for prisoners? A GUM 

Zak circular dated November 25, 1926: 25 percent of the wag!lS 

of a worker of equivalent skill in state industry? Shut up, and 

tear it up! We are robbing ourselves of wages! A prisoner should 

be paid? Let ,him say thank you he, wasn't shot. The Corrective 

Labor Code of 1933? Forget it once and for all; take it out of 

all camp safes. "Every violation of nationwide codes on labor 

... only on the basis of agreement with'the Central Council of 

Trade Unions-the VTsSPS"? Do you really think we are going 

to go to the VTsSPS? What's the VTsSPS anyway? All we have 

to do is spit on it and it will blow away! Article 75: "The rations 

are to be increased for heavier labor"? About face! Rations' are 

to be reduced for easier work. Just like that, and the food allotment 

is intact. 

The Corrective Labor Code with its hundreds of articles was 

swallowed up as if by a shark; and not only was it true, that for 

twenty-five years afterward no one, c!lughf a glimpse of it, but 

nev~ its name was unsuspected. ,_ 

They shook up the Archipelago, and they became convinced 

that'beginning back there with Solovki, and even more so during 

the period of the canals, the entire camp machinery had become 

intolerably loose. And now they got rid of all that weakness. 

In the very first place, the whole guard system was no good. 

These weren't real camps at all; they had guards posted on the 

watchtowers only at night, and at the gatehouse there was just one 

unarmed guard, who could even be persuaded to let one out for 

a bit. They were still permitting, kerosene' lighting around the 

perimeter. And several dozen prisoners were being taken to work 

outside the camp by just. a single rifleman. So now they wired 

the perimeter for electric light (using politically reliable, electri: 

cians and motor mechanics). The riflemen of the guard were 

provided with battle statutes and military training. Attack-trained 

German shepherds were included in the required service staffs, 

with their own breeders and trainers, and their own separate 

statutes. The camps began to asum~ at long last, a fully modem, 

contemporary appearance, which we know very well indeed. 

124 THE GULAG ARCHIP.ELAGO 

This is not the place to list the many small details of daily life 

in which the camp regimen was made stricter and tightened up. 

And the many cracks that were discovered via which freedom 

could still observe the ArChipelago. All those ties were now 

broken off, and the cracks were filled in, and the last few "observers' 

commissions" were expelled.s (At the same time the 

3. There is not going to be any other place in this book for an explanation 

of .what these were. So let this be a lengthy note for those. curious about it. 

Hypocritical bourgeois society thought up the idea of inspection of conditions 

in places of confinement and of the course of prisoner correction. In 

Tsarist Russia "the societies of 'guardianship over prisons"-"for the improvement 

of the physical and moral state of tliC prisoners" -were the charitable 

prison committees and the societies of prison patronage. In American prisons, 

commissipns of observers, consisting of public representatives, already possessed 

broad rights in the twenties and thirties, including even the right of re- 

, lease ahead of term (not petitioning for it, but release itself, without action 

by a court). And indeed our dialectical legal experts pointedly protest: "One 

must not forget wlrat clas$es the commissions represent. They reash decisions 

in accordance with their class interests." 

It is quite a different thing here in our country. The very first ''Temporary 

Instruction" of July 23, 1918, which created the first camps, provided for the 

creation of "assigJlmelll commissions" attached to Provincial Penal Departments. 

They assigned all sentenced prisoners one of seven different types of 

confinement, which had been established in the early Russian Soviet Federated 

Socialist Republic .. This work (which apparently replaced that of the courts) 

was so important that the People's Commissariat of Justice in its report of 

1920 cal1ed the activity of the assignment commissions "the nerve center of 

penal operations." Their makeup was very democratic; in 1922, for example!, 

it was a troika: the Chief of the Provincial·NKVD Administration, a member 

of the Presidium of the Provincial Court, and the Chief of Places of Confinement 

in' the specific provillce. Later on one person was added from the Provincial 

Workers' and Peasants' Inspection .and the Provin1:ial Trade Union 

Council. But as early as 1929 there was great dissatisfaction with the commissions: 

they exercised their power to release prisoners before the end of term 

and to grant other benefits to hostile-class elements. ''This was the rightistopportunist 

practice of the NKVD leadership." For this reason, assignment 

commissions were abolished in that selfsame year of the Great Turning Point 

and in their place observers' commissions were created whose chairmen were 

judges, and whose. members consisted of the chief of the camp, the prosecutOr, 

and a representative of the pl/blic-from workers in penal institl/tions, the 

police, the district executive committee, or the Komsomol. And as our jurists 

pointedly declared: "One must not forget what classes--" Oh, excuse me, I 

have already quoted that. • . . And the observers' commissions were entrusted 

with these tasks: by the NKVD, to decide the question of time off sentences 

and release before the end of term, and by VTslK (so to speak, by parliament), 

to verify the fl/lfillmelll of the prodl/ction and financial plans. . 

. And it was these observers' commissions which were abolished at the beginning 

of the Second Five-Year Plan. Speaking franklY, none of the prisoners 

sighed over the loss. 

Another thing about classes now that we've mentioned them: one of the 

authors of that same col1ection we have cited so often before, Shestakova, on 

the basis of materials from the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, 

"reached a strange conclusion as to the similarity of the social origins of prison 

.ers in bourgeois prisons and in our country." To her surprise it turned out

The Archipelago Hardens I. 125 

camp phalanxes-even though there seem to have been glimmerings 

of socialism in them-were renamed columns so as to distinguish 

them from Franco's.) The camp Security Section, which, 

. up to .this time, had had to make allowances for the goals of the 

general productive work and of the plan, now acquired its own 

self-contained dominating significance, to the detriment of all 

kinds of productive work and of any staff of specialists. True, 

they did not drive out the camp Cultural and Educational Sec- . 

tions, but this was partly because it was convenient to collect 

denunciations and summon stool pigeons through them. 

And an iron curtain descended around the Archipelago. No 

one other than the officers and sergeants of the NKVD could 

enter and leave- via the camp gatehouse. That harmonious order 

of things was established which the zeks themselves would.soon 

come to consider the only conceivable one, the one we will describe 

in this part of this book-without the red ribbons by this 

time, and containing much more "labor" than "correction." . 

And that is whim the wolfs fangs werebaredl And that is when j 

the bottomless pit of the Archipelago gaped wide! . 

"til shoe you in tin cans, but you're going to go out to work!" 

"If there aren't enough railroad ties, I'll make one out of you!" 

And that is when, sending freight trains through Siberia with 

a machine gun on the roof of every third car, they droye the 58's 

into excavation pits to guard them more securely. And that was 

when, even before the first shot of World wllt'n, back when all 

Europe still danced fox trots, they could not manage to crush 

the lice in the Mariinsk distributor (the intercamp transit prison 

of the Mariinsk Camps) and brushed them off 'theclothes with 

whisk bmoms. Typhus broke out, and in one short period fifteen 

thousand corpses were thrown into a ditch--curled up and naked, 

since even their underpants had been cut off them to be preserved 

for future use. (We have already recalled the typhus which raged 

at the Vladivostok Transit Camp.) 

that both there and here those in prison wete ... workers. Well, of course, 

there has to be some kind of dialectical explanation here, but she coul!in't 

find any. And we wi1\ add on our own bebalf that this "strange resell\oll!nce" 

was violated only in a minor degree in 1937-1938 when high sta~ offillials 

flocked into the camps. But very soon the proportions evened out.: ~ :·thJ> mUltimillion 

waves of the war and the postwar period consisted only of waves of 

the worki1lg classes. 


And there was only one of its new acquisitions of the recent 

past that Gulag did not part. with: the encouragement of the 

hoodlums, the thieves (the blatnye). Even more consistently than 

before, the thieves were given all the "commanding heights" in 

camp. Even more consistently than before, the thieves were egged 

on against the 58's, permitted to plunder them withol,lt any 

obstacles, to beat, to choke. The thieves became just like an internal 

camp police, camp storm troopers. (During the war years in 

many camps the custodial staffs were cut back to almost nothing 

and therr work was entrusted to the commandanfs headquarters, 

meaning to ''the thieves who had become bitches," to the bitches 

-and the bitches were more effective than any custodial staff: 

after all, there was no prohibition against their beating.) 

They say that in February:-March, ~938, a secret instruction 

was circulated in the NKVD: Reduce the number of prisoners. 

(And not by releasing them, of course.) I do not see anything in 

the least impossible here: this was'a logical instruction because 

there w~ simply not enough housing, clothing, or food. Gulag 

was grinding to a halt from exhaustion. , 

And this was when the pellagra victims lay down and died en 

masse. This was when the chiefs of convoy began to test the 

accuracy of machine-gun fire by shooting at the stumbling zeks. 

And this was when every morning the orderlies hauled the corpses 

to the gatehouse, stacking them there. 

In the Kolyma, that pole of cold and cruelty in the Archipelago, 

.that very same about-face took place with a sharpness worthy of 

a pole. . 

According to the recollections of Ivan Semyonovich Karpunich-Braven 

(former commander of the 40th Division and of the 

XII Corps, who recently died with his notes incomplete and 

scattered), a most dreadfully cruel system of food, work, and 

punishment was established in the Kolyma. The prisoners were so 

famished that at Zarosshy Spring they ate the corpse of a horse 

which had been lying dead for more than a week and which not 

oitIy stank but was covered with flies and maggots. At Utiny 

Goldfields the zeks ate half I} barrel of lubricating grease, brought 

there to grease the wheelbarrows. At Mylga they ate Iceland 

moss, like the deer. And when the passes were shut by snowdrifts, 

they used to issue three and a half ounces of bread a day at the 

distant goldfields, without ever making up for previous deficiencies. 

Multitudes of "goners," unable to walk by theInselves, were

The Archipelagl! Hardens 127 

dragged to work on sledges by other "goners" who had not yet 

become quite so weak. Those who lagged behind were beaten 

with clubs and tom by dogs. Working in 50 degrees 'below zero 

Fahrenheit, they were forbidden to build fires and warm themselves. 

(The thieves were allowed this.) Karpunich himself also 

tried -"cold drilling by hand" with a steel drill six and a half feet 

long, and hauling so-called "peat" (soil with broken stone and 

boulders) at 60 degrees below zero on sledges to which four men 

were hitched (the sledges were made of raw lumber, and the boxes 

on top were made of raw slab); a fifth accompanied them, a thiefexpediter, 

"responsible for fulfillment of the pian," who kept beating 

them with a stave. Those who did not fulfill the norm (and 

what does it mean-those wQ.o did not fulfill?-because; after 

all, the production of the 58's was always "stolen" by the thieves) 

were punished by the chief of the camp, Zeldin, in this way: In 

winter he ordered them to strip naked in the mine shaft, poured 

cold water over them, and in this state they had to run to the 

compound; in summer they were forced to strip naked, their 

hands were tied behind them to a common pole, and they were 

left out, tied there, under a cloud of mosquitoes. (The guard was 

covered by a mosquito net.) Then, finally, they were simply 

beaten with a rifle butt and tossed into an isolator. 

Some will object that there was nothing new in all this and no 

development-that this was a mere primitive return from the 

noisily educational canals to the directness of Solovki. Bah! But 

perhaps this was a Hegelian triad: Solovki-B.elomor-Kolyma? 

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis? The negation of a negation, but 

enriched? 

For example, here are the death carriages, which, so far· as can 

be learned, did not exist on Solovki. This is according to the recollections 

of.Karpunich at Marisny Spring (forty-one miles along 

the Srednekan trail). For an entire ten-day period the chief 

tolerated nonfulfillment of the norm. Only on the tenth day did 

he imprison in the isolator on a penalty ration those who had 

failed to fulfill and ·then had them taken out to work again. But 

whoever did not fulfill the norm, even in these circumstances, was 

given the carriage-a frame of sixteen by ten by six feet on a 

tractor sledge, made of rough beams, fastened together with construction 

staples. A small door, no windows, and inside nothing 

at all, not even any bed boards. In the evening those to be punished, 

sunk into a torpor and already indifferent, were taken from 

/ 


the penalty isolator and packed into the carriagej-locked in there 

with an enormous lock, and hauled off by tractor to a vale tw.o 

to three miles from the camp. Several of those inside cried out, 

but the tractor unhitched them and left them there for a day. 

After a day it was unlocked and the corpses were tossed out. The 

winter storms would bury them. 

At Mylga (a. subordinate camp of Elgen), under Chief Gavrik, 

the punishments for women who failed to fulfill the norm were 

lighter: simply an unheated tent in winter (but one was allowed 

to go outside and run around it), and at haying time under the 

mosquitoes-an unproteoted wattle shack (the recollections of 

Sliozberg). 

The intensification of the cruelty of the Kolyma regime waS 

outwardly marked by the fact that Garanin was made the chief 

of USVitlag (the Administration of Northeastern Camps), and 

that the Divisional Commander of the Latvian Riflemen, E. 

Berziri, was replaced as head of Dalstroi by Pavlov. (Incidentally, 

this totally unnecessary reshuffle was due fo Stalin's suspiciousness. 

What was there to make 'one think that the old Chekist 

Berzin could not just as well have satisfied the new demands of his 

associate? Would he have'hesitated?) 

At that point, they abolished the remaining days off for the 

58's and lengthened the summer workday to fourteen hours, came 

to consider 50 and 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit suitable for 

work; and allowed work to be canceled only on those days when 

the temperature was lower than 65 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. 

(And because of the caprices of. individual chiefs some took the 

prisoners out for work even at 75 below.) At the Gorny Goldfields 

(plagiarizing Solovki once more) tlIose who refused to go 

out to work were tied to the sledges and hauled thus to the mine 

face. It was also accepted in the Kolyma that the convoy 'was not 

only present to guard the prisoners but was also answerable for 

their fulfillment of the plan, and therefore had to avoid dozing and 

continue slave-driving them eternally. 

And then, too, tlie scurvy finished off many, without any help 

from the administration. 

But all that was- too little, insufficiently strict, and the number 

of prisoners wasn't being sufficiently reduced. And so the "Garanin 

shootings" began, which were outright murders. Sometimes to 

the roar of tractors, sometimes without. Many camp points were 

known for executions and mass graves: Orotukan, and POlyamy

The Archipelago Hardens I 129 

Spring, and Svistoplyas, and Annushka, and even the agricultural 

camp Dukcha, but the most famous of all on this account were 

the Zolotisty Goldfields (Chief of Camp Petrov, Security Operations 

Officers Zelenkov and Anisimov, Chief of- the Goldfields 

Barkalov, Chief of the District Branch of the NKVD Burov) and 

the Serpantinka. At Zolotisty they used to summon a brigade from 

the m~ne face in broad daylight and shoot the members down one 

after another. (And this was not a substitute for night executions; 

they took place too.) When the chief of Yuglag, Nikolai Andreyevich 

Aglanov, arrived, he liked at line-up to pick out some brigade 

or other which had been at fault for something or other and order 

it to be taken aside. And then he used to empty his pistol 'into the 

frightened, crowded mass of people, accompanying his shots with 

happy shouts. The corpses were left unburied. In May they used 

to decompose-and at that point the "goners"'who had survived 

until then were summoned to cover them up, in return for a 

beefed-up ration, even including spirits. At the Serpantinka they 

used to shoot from thirty to fifty men every day under an overhanging 

roof near the isolator. Then they dragged the corpses off . 

behind a hillock on tractor sledges. The tractor drivers, the steve- 

-dores, and the gravediggers lived in a separate barracks. After 

Garanin himself had been shot they shot all of them too. And 

another technique was used there: They led them up to a deep 

shaft blindfolded and shot them in the ear or the back of the head. 

(No one mentions any resistance whatsoever.) They shut down 

the Serpantinka and leveled both the isolator there and everything 

connected with the shootings, and filled in those shafts as well. 4 

At those same goldfields where' no executions were conducted, 

notices were read aloud or posted with the names in big letters 

and the alleged causes in small letters: "for counterrevolutionary 

propaganda," "for insulting the convoy,'" "for failure to fulfill 

the norm." 

The executions were stopped temporarily because the plan for 

getting out the gold was not being fulfilled and because they could 

not send new groups of prisoners across the frozen Okhotsk Sea. 

(M. I. Kononenko waited more than half a year to be shot at the 

Serpantinka and survived.) 

In addition, the regime hardened in respect to t~cking on new 

4. In 1954 they discovered commercial gold ores at the Serpantinka about 

which they had not known earlier. And they had to mine among human bones: 

the gold was more precious. 


terms. Gavrik at Mylga used to organize this. in a picturesque 

way: they used to ride ahead on horseback with torches (in the 

Arctic night), and behind them they· pulled with ropes to the 

district NKVD-(eighteen miles) those who faced new charges. 

At other camps it was all very routine: the Classification and 

Records Sections merely selected from the card file those whose 

unreasonably short terms' were coming to an end, summoned 

them in groups of eighty to a hundred people, and prescribed for 

each a new tenner. (R. V. Rets.) 

Actually, I almost left Kolyma out of this book. Kolyma was 

a whole separate continent of the Archipelago, and it deserves its 

own separate histories. Yes, and Kolyma was ''fortunate'': V arlam 

Shalamov survived there and has already written a lot: Yevgeniya 

Ginzburg survived there, and O. Sliozberg, N. Surovtseva, N. 

Grankina, and others-and all of them have written memoirs. 6 

I only permit myself to cite here several lines of V. Shalamovon 

the Garanin executions: 

For many months there day and night, at the morning and the 

evening checks, innumerable execution orders were read out. In a 

temperature of fifty below zero the musicians from among the nonpolitical 

offenders played a flourish before and after each order was 

read. The smoking gasoline torches ripped apart the darkness .... The 

thin sheet on which the order was written was covered with hoarfrost, 

and some chief or other who was reading the order would brush the 

sno\V1laltes from it with his sleeve so as to decipher and shout out the 

name of the next man on the list of those shot. 

And so it was that the Archipelago completed the Second Five 

Year Plan and, it would seem, entered socialism . 

• 

The beginning of the war shook the Archipelago chieftains: the 

course of the war at the very start was such that it might very 

likely have led to the b~eakdown of the entire Archipelago, and 

perhaps even to the employers having to answer to the workers . 

. S. How is it that there is such a concentration of Kolyma memoirs while 

the nOd-Kolyma memoirs are almost nonexistent? Was this because- they 

really hauled off the cream of t1)e .crop to Kolyma? Or was it, no matter how 

strange this may seem, that in the "nearby" camps they died off more rapidly?


As far as one can jUdge from the impressions of the zeks from 

. various camps, the course of events gave rise to two different 

kinds of conduct among the bosses. Some of them, those who were 

either more reasonable or perhaps more cowardly, relaxed their 

regime and began to talk with the prisoners almost gently, particularly 

during the weeks of military defeats. They were unable, of 

course, to improve the food or the maintenance. others who were 

more stubborn and more vicious began, on. the contrary, to-be 

even stricter and more threatening with the 58's, as if to promise 

them death before liberation. In the majority of the camps they 

did not even announce the beginning of the war to the prisoners. 

Our implacable passion for lies and secrecy! And only on Monday 

did the zeks learn of it from those unescorted by convoy and 

from free personnel. Wherever radio existed (such as at Ust-Vym 

and many places in the Kolyma) it was silenced for the whole period 

of our military failures. In that very same Ust-Vym Camp 

they suddenly forbade the prisoners to write letters home (they 

could still receive them), and their kinfolk thereupon decided 

they had all been shot. And in some camps (sensing intuitively 

the direction of future policy) they began to isolate the 58's from' 

the nonpolitical offenders in compounds guarded with particular 

strictness, put machine guns up on the watchtowers, and even 

spoke thus to the zeks who had formed up: "You are hostages! 

[Oh, how effervescent is this charge of carbonation, right from 

die Civil Warl How hard it is to forget those words, and how 

easily they are remembered!] If Stalingrad falls, we are going to 

shoot the lot of you!" And that was the atmosphere' in which the 

Archipelago natives asked about war communiques: Is Stalingrad 

still holding out or has it already fallen? And in the Kolyma they 

hauled the Germans, Poles, and particularly ~otable prisoners 

from the 58's to such special compounds. But they immediately 

began to free the Poles in August, 1941.° 

From the first days of the war, .everywhere in the Archipelago . 

(on opening the packages. of mobilization instructions) they 

halted all releases of 58's. There were even cases of ~leased 

prisoners being sent back to camp while on their way home. In 

6. One hundred and eighty-six Poles were released from Zolotisty out of 

2,100 brought there II- year before. They 'went into Sikorski's army in the West 

And there, evidently, they told all about Zolotisty. And in June, 1942. it was 

completely shut down. 


Ukhta on June 23 a group released was already outside the perimeter 

waiting for a train'when the convoy chased them back and 

even cursed them: "It's because of you the war began!" Karpunich 

received his release papers on the morning of June 23 but had 

not yet succeeded in getting through the gatehouse when they 

coaxed them out of him by fraud: "Show them to us!" He showed 

them and was kept in camp for another five years. This was considered 

to mean "until special orders." (When the war had already 

come to an end, in many camps they were forbidden even 

to go to the Classification and. Records Section and ask when 

they would be freed. The point was that after the war there were 

not enough people for a while, and many local administrations, 

even if Moscow allowed them to release prisoners, issued their 

own "special orders" so as to hold on to manpower. And that was 

how Y. M. Orlova was held in Karlag-and why she did not 

manage to get home in time to see her dying mother. 

. From the very beginning of the war (in aCcordance, no doubt, 

with those same mobilization instructions) food norms were 

lowered in all camps. And the foodstuffs all got worse from year 

to year: vegetables were replaced by fodder turnips, grits by vetch 

and bran. (The Kolyma was supplied from America, and in 

some places there, in contrast, even white bread put in an appearance.) 

But as a result of the prisoners' growing weaker the 

fall-off in output in vital lines of production became so bad 

. from 80 to 90 percent-that they found it useful to return to 

prewar norms. Many camp production centers got orders for 

munitions, and the enterprising directors of such minifactories 

sometimes managed to feed the zeks with supplementary food 

from auxiliary gardens. Wherever they paid wages, these, 

amounted in cash to thirty rubles monthly-and, in terms of 

wartime prices on the open market, to less than one kilogram of 

potatoes a month. 

If one were.to ask a wartime camp inmate his highest, supreme, 

and totally unattainable ambition, he would reply: ''To eat just 

once a belly full of black bread":"-and then I could die." During 

the war they buried no fewer dead in the camps than at the front, 

except that they have not been eulogized by the poets. L. A. 

Komogor, in a team of "enfeebled prisoners," was engaged in 

the following light work for the entire winter of 1941-1942: 

packing coffin crates made of four boards, two naked corpses to


each, head by feet, at the rate of thirty boxes a day. (Evidently 

the .camp was close to the capital, which was why the corpses had 

to be packed into crates.) 

The first months of the war passed and the country adapted 

to the wartime rhythm Qf life. Those who had to went off to the 

front, and those who had to went off to the rear, and those who 

had to engaged in leadership an,d wiped their brows after drinking. 

And so it was in the camps too. It turned out that all the 

scare had been for nothing, that everything was standing firm, that 

just as this particular spring had been wound up in 1937, so it 

would keep on working without stopping. Those jailers who at 

first had tried to curry favor among the zeks· now became fierce 

and knew no moderation or letup. It turned out that the forms, 

the system, of camp life had been_determined correctly once and 

for all.and would continue so for all eternity. 

Seven camp epochs will lay their cases before you, arguing as 

to which was worst for the human being. But pay atentio~ to. 

that of wartime. Zeks put it this way: Whoever didn't serve time 

in wartime didn't know what camp was really like. 

Throughout the winter of 1941-:-1942 at Vyatlag only in 

the barracks of t4e Engine.ering and Technical Personnel and 

in the repair shops was any warmth of life flickering at all. And 

all the rest was frozen cemeteries (and Vyatlag was actually engaged 

in cutting firewood for the Perm Railroad). 

Here's what the wartime camp was: more work and less food 

and less heat and worse clothes and ferocious discipline and more 

severe punishment-and that still wasn't all. The ~ks had always 

been deprived of 'external, audible protest, but the war' even did 

away with the protest inside the soul. Any scoundrel with shoulder 

boards who was hiding from the front could shake his finger and 

preach: "And how are people dying at the front? And how are 

they workiDg in freedom? And how many have died in Leningrad?" 

And as a result the zeks had no protest left· even inside 

.~vlesmeht Yes, people were dying at the front, some of them 

lying in the snow too. Yes, they were squeezing the life out of 

people in freedom, and the people were famished and starving .. 

(Yes, and the free Labor Front, into which unmarried girls from 

the villages were mobilized and in which they worked at logging. 

had only twenty-four and a half ounces of bread and soup, which 


was dishwater and was as bad as any camp.) Yes, and in the 

Leningrad blockade they allotted even less than the camp punishment-cell.ration. 

During the war·the whole cancerous tumor of 

the Archipelago turned out to be (or in any case represented itself 

to be) an allegedly important and necessary organ of the Russian 

body. It, too, was allegedly working for the war! On it, too, victory 

depended! And all this shed a false and justifying light on the 

strands of barbed wire, on the citizen chief who was shaking his 

finger-and there you were dying as one of the tumor's rotting 

cells, and you were deprived even of the dying man's satisfaction 

of cursing it. 

For the 58's the wartime camps were particularly unbearable 

because of their pasting on second terms, which hung over the 

prisoners' heads worse than any ax. The Security officers, busily 

engaged in saving themselves from the front, .discovered in wellset-up 

backwaters and backwoods, in logging expeditions, plots 

involving the participation of the world bourgeoisie, plails for 

armed revolts and mass escapes. Such aces of Gulag as Y. M. 

Moroz, the chief of UkhtPechlag, particularly encouraged investigatory 

and interrogatory activity in his camps. In UkhtPechlag 

sentences poured as if from a sack--execution, twenty years 

-"for incitement to escape," "for sabotage.~' And how many 

there were for whom no trials at all were required, whose fates 

were determined by the movements of the stars: Sikorski displeased 

Stalin, and in one night they s~ized thirty Polish women 

at Elgen and· took them off and shot them. 

There were many zeb-and this is something which was not 

fabricated, it is quite true-who applied from the first days of the 

war to be sent to the front. They had tasted the most foully stinking 

camp dregs--and now they asked to be sent to the front in 

order to defend this camp system and to die for it in a penalty 

company! ("And if I come out'of it alive, I will return to serve 

out the-t'e&t of my term!") The orthodox Communists now assure 

us that they were the ones who begged to be sent to the front. 

And some of them did (including those Trotskyites who had 

survived the executions), but not very many. For the most part 

they had got thelDSelves set up in certain quiet spots in camp (not 

without the' help of the Communist chiefs either), where they 

could spend their time in contemplation, discussion, recollection, 

and waiting, and, after all, in a penalty company you'd last no

The Archipelago Hardens 135 

more than three days. This desire to enlist was an impulse not of 

ideological principle but of heart. That is what the Russian 

character was: It is better to 'die in an open field than in a r~ten 

shed! To unwind, to become, even for just a short while, "like 

everyone else," an unrepressed citizen. To get away from the 

stagnant feeling of doom here, from the pasting on of new terms, 

from silent annihilation. And some of them took an even simpler 

view of it all, but one which was not in the least shameful: Out 

there you would still die eventually, but for the moment they 

would give you a uniform to wear, feed you up, give you something 

to drink, transport you, and you could look out of the wind


Such was the regimen the camp inmates of Khovrino earned 

with their work for the front: they produced mortar shells 

throughout the war. The little factory was adapted for this output 

by a prisoner engineer (alas, his name has not been remembered, 

but it won't get lost for good, of course). He created a design 

bureau also. He was serving time as a 58 and belonged to that 

category of human. beings mos.t repulsive to Mamulov. because 

they refused to give up their own opinions and ~nvictions. And 

yet for a time Mamulov had to tolerate this good-for-nothing! But 

no one is irreplaceable in our country! And when production was 

IIlready sufficiently under way, one day in broad daylight, in the 

presence of the office personnel (intentionally in their presence- 

let everyone know, let them tell everyone! and we are telling it 

too, you see!), Mamulov and two of his assistants rushed in, 

grabbed the engineer·by his beard, threw him to the floor, kicked 

him with their jackboots till the blood flowed, and then sent him 

off to the Butyrki to get a second term for his political declarations/ 

And this lovely little camplet was just fifteen minutes by electric 

train from the Leningrad Station. Not far, just sad! 

(The newcomer zeks who got into the camps near Moscow 

tried to hold on to them tightly if they had relatives in Moscow, 

yes, and even without that: it seemed, all the same, that you were 

not being tom away into that far-distant abyss from :which there 

was no return, that here despite everything you were on the edge 

of civilization. But this was self-deceit. They usually fed th~ 

prisoners there worse,calculating that the majority were receiving 

parcels, and they didn't even issue bedding. But the worst thing. 

was the eternally nauseating latrine rumors which kept hovering 

over these camps about prisoner transports to far away: life was 

as chancy as on the point of a needle, and it was impossible to be 

certain evep. for a day that you would be able to live it out in one 

and the same place.) 

Such are the forms into which the islands of the Archipelago 

hardened, but one need not think that as it hardened it ceased to 

exude more metastases from itself. 

In 1939, before the Finnish War, Gulag's alma mater, Solovki, 

138 I T.HB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

which had come too close to the West, was moved via the Northern 

Sea Route to the mouth of the Yenisei River and there merged 

into the already created Norillag, which soon reached 75,000 in 

size. So malignant was .solovki thar even in dying it threw off one 

last metastasis-and what a metastasis! 

The Archipelago's conquest of the unpeopled' deserts of Kazakhstan 

belongs to the prewar years. That was. where the nest 

of Karaganda camps swelled like an octopus; and fertile metastases 

were propagated in Dzhezkazgan with its poisoned cuprous 

water, in Mointy and in Balkhash. And "amps spread out over the 

north of Kazakhstan also. . 

New growths swelled in Novosibirsk Province (the Mariinsk 

Camps), in the Krasnoyarsk region (the Kansk Camps and 

Kraslag), in Khakassiya, in Buryat-Mongolia, in Uzbekistan, even 

in GornayaShoriya. . 

. Nor did the Russian North, so beloved by the Archipelago, end 

its own growth (UstVymlag, Nyroblag, Usollag), nor the Urals 

(Ivdellag). 

There are many omissions in this list. It was enough to write 

- "Usollag" to remember that there was also a camp in Usolye in 

Irkutsk Province: 

Yes l there was simply no province, be it Chelyabinsk or Kuibyshev, 

which did not give birth to its own camps. 

A new method of creating camps was adopted after the exile of 

the Germans from the Volga: whole dispossessed villages were 

enclosed, just as theywere,in a camp compound, and these were 

the Agricultural Camp Sec,:tors (the Kamensky Agricultural 

Camps between Kamyshin and Engels). 

We ask the reader's pardon for the ml!fiy g~ps and flaws in this 

chapter; we have cast only a frail bridge across the whole epoch 

of the Archipelago-siIilply because we did not have any more 

material available. We could not broadcast pleas for more on the 

radio. 

Here once again the crimson star of Naftaly Frenkel describes 

an intricate loop in the heavens of the .M-chipelago. 

e~ year 1937, which struck down its very own, did not spare 

his head either: chief of BAMlag, an NKVD gene~al, he was once 

again, out of gratitude, imprisoned in the Lubyanka, with which 

he was already familiar. But Frenkel, nonethel~s, did not weary


of thirsting for the one true service, nor did the Wise Teacher 

weary of seeking out this service. The shameful and unsuccessM 

war with Finland began and Stalin saw that he was unprepared, 

that there were no supply lines to his army thrust out into the 

Karelian snows-and ~ remembered the inventive Frenkel and 

called him in: it was ~ecesary right then, in the fierce winter, 

without any preparation whatsoever, without .any existing plans 

even, or warehouses, or automobile roads, to build three railroads 

in Karelia-one "rocade" paralleling the border, and two more 

leading up to it-and to build them in the course of three months, ' 

because it was simply a disgrace for such a great power to mess 

about with that little pug dog Finland for such a long time. This 

was straight out of a fairy tale: the evil king ordered the evil 

sorcerer to do something totally impossible and unimaginable. 

And so the leader of socialism asked: "Can you?" ~d the joyous 

merchant and black-market currency speculator answered: "Yes!" 

But this time he set his conditions: 

1. That he be taken out of Gulag entirely and that 11 n~w zek 

empire be founded, a new autonomous archipelago called' 

GULZhDS (pronounced "Gulzhedess")--'the Chief Administration 

of Camps for Railroad Construction-and that as head of 

this archipelago there be named . . . Frenkel. 

2. That all the national resources he selected would be put at 

his disposal (this was not going to be another Belomor). 

3. That during the period of extreme emergency operation 

GULZhDS would also be removed from the socialist system with 

its exasperating accounting procedures. Frenkel would not be 

required to render accounts about anything. He did not set up 

tents and did not establish any camps. He had no rations, no 

system of differentiated dining facilities, and no system. of differentiated 

food "pots"! (And it was he who had proposed the' 

system of different levels of rations in the first place! Only a genius 

can repeal the laws of a genius!) He piled up in the snow heaps 

of the best food, together with sheepskin coats and felt boots, and 

every zek could put on whatever he pleased and eat as much as 

he wanted. Only the makhorka and the vodka were controlled by 

his assistants, and they were the only things which had to be 

"earned." . 

The Great Strategist was willing. And GULZhDS was created! 

Was the Archipelago split in two? No, the Archipelago only 


grew stronger, multiplied, and would proceed· to take over the 

whole country even more swiftly. 

Frenkel, however, did not suced~ co~pleting his Karelian 

railroads; Stalin hurried to end the wal' ~n a/draw. But GULZhDS 

hardened and grew. It received m9VF'a;ft more new orders to 

carry out (but now with normal accotHlting procedures). There 

was the "rocade" railroad parallelitJg the Iranian border, then the 

"rocade" railroad paralleling the Volga from Syzran near Kuibyshev 

on down to Stalingrad, and then the 'fRailroad of Death" 

from Salekhard to Igarka, and then BAM proper-the Baikal 

Amur Main Line, from Taishet to Bratsk and farther. 

Further, Frenkel's idea enriched the development of Gulag 

itself; it came to be considered necessary to organize Gulag itself 

in terms of branch administrations. Just as the Sovnarkom-the 

Council of People's Commissars-consisted of Narkomats-Peo-' 

pIe's Commissariats-so Gulag created its own ministries for 

its own empire: GlavLeslag-the Chief Administration of Logging 

Camps; GlavPromstroi-the Chief Administration of Camps 

for Industrial Construction; GULGMP-the Chief Administration 

of Camps for the Mining and Metallurgical Industry. 

Then came the war. And all these Gulag ministries wereevacuated 

to various cities. Gulag itself landed in Ufa; GULZhDS in 

Vyatka. The communications between provincial cities were by 

no means so reliable as the radial conilnunications out of Moscow, 

,and for the whole first half of the war it was as if Gulag 

had disintegrated: it no longer ran the whole Archipelago, and 

each surrounding area of the Archipelago was subordinate to the 

administration evacuat~d to it. Thus it was that it fell on Frenkel 

to run the entire Russian Northeast from Kirov (because other. 

than the Archipelago there was almost nothing else there). But 

those who envisioned in this the fall of the Roman Empire were 

mistaken, for it W9uld gather itself together again after the war 

in even greater majesty. 

Frenkel remembered an old friendship; he summoned and 

named to an important position in GULZhDS a man named Bu 

. khaltsev, who had been the editor of his yellow sheet, The 

Kopeck, in prerevolutionary Mariuppl and whose colleagues had 

either been shot or scattered across the face of the earth. 

Frenkel's talents were outstanding not only in commerce and 

organization. Taking in rows of figures at a glance, he could add


them up in his head. He loved to brag that he could recognize 

forty thousand prisoners by' face and that he knew the family 

name, given name and patronymic of each, their code article and 

their term (and it was required procedure in his camps to announce 

all this info~ati.on at the apprqach of high-ranking 

chiefs). He always managed without a chieCpn¥Deer. Looking at 

a plan {or a railroad station that had been b~ught him, he was 

quick to note a mistake in it, and then he wo\)ld crumple Il:P the 

plan, throw it in his subordinate's face, and say: "It's time you 

understand that you are not a designer, just a jackass!" He had Ii 

nasal twang and his voice was ordinarily calm. He was short. He 

used to wear the high karakul hat-the papakha-of a railroad 

general, dark blue on top, with a red lining. And he atways, 

through the varied years, wore a field jacket of. military· cut-a 

garment which simultaneously constituted a, _claim to being a 

leader of the state and a declaration of not'belonging to the intelligentsia. 

Like Trotsky he always lived aboard trains, traveling 

around his scattered construction battlefields.; And those summoned 

from the discomfort in which natives of the Archipelago' 

lived to confer with him in his railroad car were astonished at his 

bentwood chairs, his upholstered furniture, and were all the more 

timid jn confronting the reproaches and orders of their chief. He 

himself never entered a single barracks, never smelled all that 

stench-he asked anddemanded only work. He particularly loved 

to telephone construction projects at night, helping to perpetuate , 

the legend about himself that he never slept. (And in fact during, 

Stalin's era many other big shots were accustomed to do the 

same.) He never married. 

' 

He was never again arrested. He became Kaganovich's deputy 

for railroad construction and died in Moscow in the fifties with 

the rank of lieutenant general, in old age, in honor, and in peace., 

I have the feeling that he really hated this country! 

Chapler 5 

• 

What the Archipelago 

Stands On 

There used to Qe a city in the Far East with the loyal name of 

Tsesarevich-"Crown Prince." The Revolution saw it renamed 

;yndob~vS meaning "Free." The Amur .. Cossacks who once inhabited 

the city'were s~atered-and the city was empty. They 

had to resettle it with someone. And they did: with prisoners and 

the Chekists guarding them. The whole'city of Svobodny became 

a camp (BAMlag). 

And so it is that symbols are spontaneously born of life. 

The camps are not merely the "dark side" of our postrevohitionary 

life Their scale made them not an aspect, not just a side, 

but very nearly the very liver of events. It was rare for our halfcentury 

so to manifest itself so consistently, with such finality. 

Just as every point is formed by the intersection of at least two 

lines, every event is formed by the intersection of at least two 

necessities--and so although on one hand our economic require; 

ments led us to the system of camps, this by itself might have led 

us to labor armies, but it intersected with the theoretical justification 

for the camps, fortunately already formulated. 

And so they met and grew together: like a thorn into a nest, or 

a protuberance into a hollow. And that is how tlie Archipelago 

was born. 

The economic need manifested itself, as always, openly and 

greedily; for the state which h.ad decided to strengthen itself in a 

very short period of time (and here three-quarters of the matter 

142

· What the Archipelago Stands On I 143 

was in the period allotted, just as with Belomor!) and which did 

not require anything from outside, the need was manpower: 

a. Cheap in the extreme, and'better still-for free. 

b. Undemanding, capable of being shifted about from place 

to place any day of the week, free of family ties, not requiring 

either established housing, or schools, or hospitals, or 

even, for a certain length of time, kitchens and baths. 

It was possible to obtain such manpower only by swallowing 

up one's own sons. 

The theoretical justification could not have been fotmulated 

with such conviction in the haste of those years had it not had its 

beginnings in the past century. Engels discovered that the human 

being had arisen not through the perception of a moral idea and 

not through the· process of thought, but out of happenstance and 

·meaningless work (an ape picked up a stone-and with this 

everything began). Marx, concerning himself with a less remote 

time ("Critique of the Gotha Program"), declared with equal 

conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders . 

(true, he referred here to criminals; he never even conceived that 

his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary 

contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not 

languishing (for all that was superstructure!)-but productive 

labor. He himself had never in his life taken a pick in hand. To the 

end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled 

timber, and we don't even know how his firewood was split-but 

he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist. 

And for his followers everything now fell into place: To compel 

a prisoner to labor every day (sometimes fourteen hOurs at a 

time, as at the Kolyma mine faces) was humane and would lead 

to his correction. On the contrary, to limit his confinement to a 

prison cell, courtyard, and vegetable garden; to give him the 

chance to read books, write, think, and argue' during these years 

meant to treat him "like cattle." (This is from that same "Critique 

of the Gotha Program.") . 

True, in the heated times immediately following the October 

Revolution they paid little heed to these subtleties, and it seemed 

even more humane simply to shoot them. And those whom they 

did· not shoot but imprisoned in the earliest camps were im- 


prisoned there not for purposes of correction. but to render them 

harmless, purely for quarantine. 

The point is that even then some minds were occupied with 

penal theory, for example, Pyotr Stuchka, and in the Guiding 

Principles 0/ the CrimiTUl/ Law 0/ the Russian Soviet Federated 

Socialist Republic of 1919, the very concept of punishment was 

subjected to a new definition. Punishment, it was there very refreshingly 

affirmed, is neither revenge (the workers' and peasants' 

state was not taking vengeance on an offender) nor expiation of 

gUilt (there is no such thing as individual guilt, merely class causation), 

but a defensive measure to protect the social structure--a 

measure of social defense. 

' 

Once it is accepted as a "measure of social defense," then it follows 

that war is war, and you either have to shoot ("the supreme 

measure of social defense") or else imprison. But in this the idea 

of correction had somehow gotten muddied-though in that very 

same 1919 the Eighth Congress of the Party had called for "cor-. 

rection." And, foremost, it had become incomprehensible: What 

should olle be corrected for if there had been no gUilt? It was 

hardly possible to be corrected for class causation!? 

By then the Civil War had come to an end. In 1922 the first 

Soviet Codes were established. In 1923 the "congress of the 

penitentiary labor workers" took place. The new "basic principles 

of criminal legislation" were composed in 1924-the foundations 

of the new Criminal Code of 1926 (which hung around our necks 

for thirty-five years). And through all this the newly found concepts 

that there is no "guilt" and no "punishment," but that there 

is "social danger" and "social defense," remained intact 

Of course, this was more convenient. Such a theory made it 

possible to arrest anyone as a hostage, as a "doubtful person" 

(Lenin's telegram to Yevgeniya Bosh), even to exile entire peoples 

becau~e they were dangerous (and the examples are well 

known), but, given all this, one had to be a first-class juggler in 

order still to construct and maintain in purified form the theory 

of correction. 

However, there were jugglers, and the theory was there, and 

the camps were indeed called corrective. And we can bring many 

quotations to bear even now. 

Vyshinsky: "All Soviet penal policy is based on a dialectical [I] 

combination of the principle of repression and compulsion with

What tlJe Archipelago Stands On I 145 

the principle of persuasion and re-education."1 "All bourgeois 

penitentiary institutions try to 'harass' the criuiinal by subjecting 

him to physical and moral suffering." (They wish to "reform" 

him.) "In distinction from bourgeois punishment the sufferings 

of the prisoners in our cowttry are not an end but a means. [Just 

as there, too, it would seem not an end but a means.-A.S.) The 

end in our country ... is genuine reform, genuine correction, so 

conscientious laborers should emerge from the camps." 

Now have you got it? Even though we use compulsion, we are 

nonetheless correcting (and also, as it turns out, via suffering!) 

-except it is not known exactly from what. 

But right then and there, on a nearby page, we find: 

"With the assistance of revolutionary violence the correctivelabor 

camps localize and render harmless the criminal elements 

of the old ~ociety."2 (We.are still talking about the old society! 

And even in 1952 we will still keep talking about the "old s0- 

ciety." "Pile everything on the wolf's neck"-blaine it all·onthe 

old society I ) 

So not a single word about correction? We are localizing and 

rendering harmless? 

And then in that same 1934: 

''The two-in,one task is suppression plus re-education of anyone 

who can be re-educated." 

Of anyone who can be re-educated. It becomes clear that correction 

is not for everyone. 

And now a ready-made phrase from somewhere already ftits 

about among the small-time authors: ''the correction of the corrigibles," 

"the correction of the corrigibles." 

And what about the incorrigibles? Into a common grave? Tp 

the Moon (Kolyma)? Below Shmidtikha* (NorilSk)? 

Even the Corrective Labor Code of 1924 was criticized by 

. Vyshinsky's jurists, from the JIeights of 1934, for "a false concept 

of universal correction." Because this code says nothing 

about destruction. 

No one promised that they would correct the 58's. 

And therefore I have called this Part "The Destructive-Labor 

Camps." That's how we felt them on our pelts. 

I. A. Y. Vyshinsky, from his preface to I. L. Averbakh, op. cit., p. vi. 

2. Ibid .. p. vii. . . 


And if some of the jurists' quotations fit together crookedly, so 

be it, just go raise up Stuchka from the grave, or drag out Vyshinsky, 

and let them make head or tail of it. I am not to blame. 

It is only now, on sitting down to write my own book, that I 

decided to leaf through my predecessors' works; yes, good people 

had to help even here, because you'd not now be able to find 

their works anywhere. And as we dragged our soiled camp pea 

jackets about, we never even guessed at the existence of such 

books. That all our life there in camp was determined not by the 

will of the citizen chief but by some kind of legendary labor code 

for prisoners-that was not just an obscure latrine rumor for us 

alone; even the chief of the-camp, a major, wouldn't have believed 

it for anything. Published in an edition "for official use only," 

never held in anyone's hands, and no one knew whether they 

were still kept in the Gulag safes or whether they had all been 

burned as wrecking activity. Neither were quotations from them 

hung up in the cultural and educational corners, nor were their 

miserable figures proclaimed from the wooden rostrums: How 

many hours long was the workday? How many rest days in a 

month? Is there payment for labor? Was there any provision for 

mutilation? Yes, and you would get a big horse laugh from your 

fellow zeks too if you even asked such questions. . 

Our diplomats were the ones who had seen and read these 

humane words. They had, it would seem, held up and brandished 

this booklet at international conferences. Indeed! I myself have 

onlJJlow obtained the quotations-and even now my tears flow: 

• In the Guiding Principles of 1919: Given the fact that punishment 

is not vengeance, then it may include no elements of 

torture. 

• In 1920: The use of the condescending familiar form of 

address is forbidden in speaking to the prisoners. (And, forgive 

my language, but what about ."--- in the mouth"-is that 

permissible? ) 

• The Corrective Labor Code of 1924, Article 49: "The 

prison regime must be deprived of all elemetlts of torture; handcuffs, 

punishment cells [!], strict solitary confinement, deprivation 

of food, visits through a grating only are under no circumstances 

permitted." 

Well, that's enough. And there are no later instructions. That's 

enough even for the diplomats. And not even that is needed by 

Gulag.

What the Archipelago Stands On I 147 

And in the Criminal Code of 1926 there was an Article 9. I 

learned about it by chance and learned it by heart: 

"Measures of social defense may not have as their purpose the 

infliction of physical suferi~g or the humiliation of human dignity 

and do not aim at exacting revenge and retribution." 

Now that is clarity for you! Because I enjoyed catching our 

bosses out on legal grounds, I often rattled off this section to 

them. And all these protectors of ours only popped their eyes .in 

astonishment and indignation. There were old veterans who had 

served for twenty years, who were nearing their pensions, who 

had never yet heard of any Article 9, and for that matter had 

never held the Code in their hands. 

Oh, "what an intelligent, farsighted humane administration 

from top to bottom," as Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New 

York State wrote in Life magazine, after having visited Gulag. 

"In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling 

of dignity." That is what he comprehended and saw. 

Oh, fortunate New York State, to have such a perspicacious 

jackass for a judge! 

And oh, you well-fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible 

foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens- 

beginning with those correspondents who back in Kem asked the 

zeks questions in the presence of the camp chiefs-how much 

you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding 

in areas where you did not gra~p. a lousy thing! 

Human dignity! Of persons condemned without trial? Who 

are made to sit down beside Stolypin cars at stations with their' 

rear ends in the mud? Who, at the whistle of the citizen jailer's 

lash, scrape up with their hands the urine-soaked earth and 

carry it away, so as not to be sentenced to the punishment block? 

Of those educated women who, as a- great honor, have been 

found worthy of laundering the linen of the citizen chief of the 

camp and of feeding his privately owned pigs? And who, at his 

first drunken gesture, have to make themselves available, so as 

not to perish on general work the next day? 

Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late 

.autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound 

is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still 

more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged 

one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom 

-this is an Island of Paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" 

1.48 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

-a ~cientific institute staffed with prisoners-in its most privileged 

period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, 

chasing me away from the bonfire. I am wrapped in a padded 

jacket, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind. . 

But she-who has already been standing in tlte wind for hours, 

her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing 

numb and still. And then again she begs piteously: "Citizen 

Chief! Forgive me! Please forgive me! I won't do it again." 

The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning 

next to my ear. The citizen chief at 'the gatehouse fires up his 

stove and does not answer. 

This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from 

which workers came into our compound to lay wa~er pipes and 

to repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, 

beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade 

and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright 

lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging 

at her gray work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a 

thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day, when 

they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, 

slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino 

Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow 

city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught 

on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, 

dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the 

fugitive girl, the entire. camp would be. deprived of visits and 

parcels for a whole month because of her escape. And the women 

brigadiers went· into a rage, and they were all shouting, one 

of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, 

I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors andclip, 

clip---take off all her hair in front of the line-up!" (This 

wasn't something she had thought up herself. This was. the way 

they punished women in Gulag.) But the girl who was now standing 

outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: 

"At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!" 

The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; 

everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had 

been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the 

gatehouse. This had been at 6 P.M. and it was now 11 P.M. She 

tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out

Whot the Archipelago Stands On I 149 

his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will 

be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: 

"Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it 

any more!" 

But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: All right. 

idiot! .come on in! - 

The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that 

the next day was Sunday and she would not be needed for work. 

Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had 

been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous 

thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach 

you a lesson for the rest of your life. 

Fire, fire! We fought the war-and we looked into the bonfires 

to see what kind of a Victory it would be. The wind wafted 

a glowing husk from the bonfire. 

To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world 

li~ read about you. 

This was happening at the end of 1947, a few days before the 

thirtieth anniversary 9f the October Revolution, in our capital 

city of Moscow, which had just celebrated eight hundred years of 

its cruelties. Little more than a mile away from the All-Union 

Agricultural Fair Grounds. And a half-mile away from the Ostankino 

Museum of Serf Arts and Handicrafts . 

• 

Serfs! This comparison occurred to many when they had the 

time to think about it, and not accidentally either. Not just individual 

features, but the whole central meaning of their existence 

was identical for serfdom and the .Archipelago; they were forms 

of social organization for .the forced and pitiless exploitation of 

the unpaid labor of millions of slaves. Sqc. days a week, and often 

seven, the natives of the Archipelago went out to fatiguing "barshchina""'-forced 

labor-which did not bring them even the 

least little return. They were allowed neither a fifth day nor even a 

. seventh in which to work for themselves, because their sustenance 

·was a "mesyachina"-a monthly serf ration-a camp ration. 

They were divided just as precisely into the categories of 

those paY,ing their dues in the form of for~d labor-(Group 

"A") and the hQusehold serfs'(Group "B"), who directly serve~ 


the estate owner ,(chief of the camp) and the estate (the compound). 

Only those totally unable to get down from their peasant 

stoves (board bunks) were recognized as. infirm (Group "C"). 

And similarly, there were punishments for offenders (Group 

"D"), except for the c!ifference that the estate owner, acting in 

his own interests, punished with a lash in the stable and the loss 

of fewer workdays, and he had no punishment block, whereas, 

in accordance with state instructions, the chief of the camp placed 

the culprit in the Shlzo-the Penalty Isolator-or the BURthe 

Strict Regimen Barracks. Like the estate owner, the chief of 

camp could take any slave to be his lackey, cook; barber, or 

jester (and he could also assemble a serf theater if he wished); 

he could take any slave woman as a housekeeper, a c~ncubine, 

or a servant. Like an estate owner, he could play tricks and show 

his temper as much as he liked. (The chief of the Khimki Camp, 

Major Volkov, noticed that a girl prisoner was drying her long 

flaxen locks in the sun after. washing them, and for some reason 

this made him angry and he shouted: "Cut off her hair." And 

they immediately cut all her hair off. That was in 1945.) And 

whenever the camp chief or the estate owner changed, all the 

slaves obediently awaited the' new master, made guesses about 

his habits, and surrendered in advance to his power. Being incapable 

of foreseeing what the will of the master would be, the 

serf took little thought for the morrow, nor did the prisoner. The 

serf could not marry without the master's permission, and it was' 

even more the case that a prisoner could acquire a camp wife 

only with the indulgence of the camp chief. Just as a.serf had 

not chosen his slave's fate, since he was not to blame for his 

birth, neither did the prisoner choose his; he also got into the 

Archipelago by pure fate. 

This similarity has long since been discerned by the Russian 

language: "Have you fedJhe people?" "Have you sent the people 

out to work?" "How many people do you have there?" "Send 

me one person!" People, people, whom do they mean? That's 

the way they talked about serfs. And that is how they speak 

about prisoners.s One cannot speak like that about officers or 

leaders, however-"How many people do you have?" No one 

would understand you. 

3, And thnt is also the way they talk about collective farmers and unskilled 

laborers, but we are not going to carry this any further. •


But there are some who will object that nonetheless there are 

really not so many similarities between serfs and prisoners. There 

. are more differences. 

And we agree with that: there are more differences. But what 

is surprising is that all the differences are to the credit of serfdom! 

All the differences are to the discredit of the Gulag Archipelago! 

The serfs did not work longer than from sunrise to sunset. 

The zeks started work in darkness and ended in darkness (and 

they didn't always end either). For the serfs'Sundays were sacred; 

and the twelve sacred Orthodox holidays as well, and local saints' 

days; and a certain number of the twelve days of Christmas (they 

went about in'mummers' costumes). The prisoner was fearful 

on the eve of every Sunday: he didn't know whether they would 

get it off. And he never got holidays at all (just as the Volga 

didn't get any days off, remember?); those firsts of May and 

those sevenths of November involved more miseries, with searches 

and special regimen, than the holida~ were worth (and a certain 

number were put into punishment blocks every year precisely 

on those very days). For the serfs Christmas and Easter 

were genuine holidays; and as for a body search either after 

work or in the morning or at night ("Stand next to your cots!"), 

the serfs knew not of these! The serfs lived in permanent huts, 

regarding them as their own, and when at night they lay down 

on top of their stoves, or on their sleeping platform between 

ceiling and stovo-their ''polaty''-or else on a bench, they knew: 

This is my own place, I have slept here forever and ever, and I 

always will. The prisoner did not know what barracks he would 

be in on the morrow (and even when he returned from work he 

could not be certain that he would sleep in that place that night) . 

He did not have his "own" sleeping shelf or his "own" multiple 

bunk. He went wherever they drove him. . 

The serf on "barshchina," or forced labor, had his own horse, 

his own wooden plow, ax, scythe, spindle, chests, dishes, and 

clothes. Even the household serfs, as Herzen writes" always had 

some clothes of their own which they could leave to their neare'St 

and dearest and which were almost never taken away by the 

4. A. I. Herzen, Pismo SIMomy Tovarishchll (ullf'r 10 all Old Comrad,,). 

Academy Edition of Collected Works. Vol. XX, p. 585. 

152 I THE GUL.AG ARCHIPELAGO 

estate owner. In spring the zek was forced to turn in his winter 

clothing and in the autumn to turn in his summer clothing. At 

inventories they emptied his bag and took away for the government 

every. extra piece l>f clothing. He was not permitted to 

have even a small penknife, or a bowl, and as Jar as livestock 

was concerned, only lice. One way or another a serf would cast 

his line and catch a fish. The zek caught fish only with a spoon 

and only in his gruel. The serf had a little cow named Brownie 

or at least a goat and chickens. The zek's lips never touched milk, 

and he'd never see hen's eggs for whole decades, and probably 

he'd not recognize them if he did. 

Old Russi" which experienced Asiatic slavery for seven whole 

centuries, did not for the most part- know famine. "In Russia 

no one has ever died of starvation," said the proverb. And a 

proverb is not made up out.of lies and nonsense. The serfs were 

slaves, but they had full bellies. G Th~ Archipe1ago lived for 

~edaced in the grip of cruel famine. The zeks would scuffle over 

a herring tail from the garbage pail. For Christmas and Easter 

even the thinnest ~rf peasant broke his fast with fat bacon. But 

even the best worker in camp could get fat bacon only in parcels 

from home. 

The serfs lived in families. The sale or exchange ·of a serf 

away from his family was a universally recognized and proclaimed' 

barbarism. Popular Russian literature waxed indignant 

over this. Hundreds of serfs, perhaps. thousands (but this is unlikely), 

were torn from their families. But not millions. The 

zek was separated from his family on the first" day of his arrest 

and, in 50 percent of all cases--forever. If a sQn was arrested 

with his father (as we heard from Vitkovsky) or a wife together 

with her husband, the greatest care was taken to see that 

they did not meet at the same c~p. And if by some chance they 

5. There is testimony on this for all the Russian centuries. In the seventeenth, 

Yurl Krizhanich wrote that the peasants and artisans of Muscovy lived 

more bountifully than those of the West, that the poorest inhabitants in Russia 

ate good bread, fish. meat. Even in the Time of Troubles ''the long-preserved 

granaries had not been exhausted, there were stacks standing in the fields; 

threshing floors were filled full with specially stacked sheaves and stooks 

and haystacks-for from four to ten years" (Avraami Palitsyn). In the eigh" 

teenth century, Fonvizin, comparing· the standard of living of the· Russian 

peasants with that of the peasants of Languedoc, Provence. wrote: "I find, 

objeCtively judging things, that the state of our pea·ants is incomparably happier." 

In the nineteenth century, Pushkin wrote of the serf village: 

''The.evidence of abundance and work is everywhere." 

:,


did meet, they were separated as quickly as possible. Similarly, 

every time a man and a woman zek came together in camp for 

fleeting or real love, they hastened to penalize them with the 

punishment cell, to separate -them and send them away from 

one another. And even the most sentimental of our writing 

ladies-Marietta Shaginyan or Tatyana Tess-never let fall a 

single silent tear into their kerchiefs about that. (Well, of course, 

they didn't know. Or else thought it was necessary.) 

And even the herding of serfs from one place to another didn't 

occur in a frenzy of haste; they were permitted to pack their 

goods and chattels, to gather up their movables, and to move 

calmly a score or so of miles away. But a prisoner transport 

would hit the zek like a sudden squall: twenty minutes or ten, 

just time enough to tum in camp property, and his entire life 

would be turned upside down, and he would go off somewhere 

to the ends of the earth, maybe forever. In the life of one serf 

there was hardly ever more than one move, and most often they 

stayed put. But a native of the Archipelago unfamiliar with 

prisoner transports couldn't have been found. And many zeks 

were moved five, seven, eleven times. 

Some serfs managed to escape to the freer "obrok" system* 

a fixed money payment to the serf-owner-and the "obrok" serfs 

might travel far out of sight of the cursed master, go into trade, 

enrich themselves, and live like free people. But even the zeks 

privileged enough to· go about. without conv~y lived inside that 

same camp compound and had to drag themselves early in the 

morning to the very same type of work to which the column of 

the other zeks was driven. 

The household serfs were for the most part degenerate parasites 

("Servants are a boorish spawn," as the saying goes): they 

lived off the labor of the "barshchina" serfs; but at least they 

themselves did not rule over the "barshchina" serfs. It was doubly 

nauseating for the zek: that, in addition to everything else, the 

degenerate trusties directed them and ordered them around. 

And in general, the entire situation of the serfs was alleviated 

by the fact that the estate owner had necessarily to be merciful 

to them: they were worth money; their work brought him wealth. 

~hT camp chief was merciless to the prisoners: he had not bought 

. them, and he would not be willing them to his children, and if 

they died, others would be sent him. 


No, we got ourselves involved to no purpose in comparing 

our zeks with the serfs of the estate owners. The situation of the 

latter, one has to admit, was ,very much less. harried and more 

humane. A closer comparison of the situation of the natives of 

the Archipelago would be with the factory serfs of the Urals, 

the Altai, and Nerchinsk. Or the inhabitants of the Arakcheyev* 

semimiiitary settlements. (Some people object, however, even 

to this: they, too, had it good-in the Arakcheyev settlements 

there were also nature, family, and holidays. Only the slavery 

of the ancient East is a fair comparison.) 

And there is only one, just one, plus which comes to min4 on 

the side of the zeks as opposed to the serfs: the prisoner might 

land in the Archipelago even as a juvenile of twelve to fifteen 

but JIOt from the very day of his birthf He did at least snatch a 

numim" ,of years in freedom before imprisonment! As for the advantage 

of a.definite Sentence in comparison with the lifetime of. 

peasant serf~om, there lIJ'e many qualifications: namely, if the 

term was not a "quarter"-twenty-five years; if the article was 

not 58; if it wasn't "until special orders"; if they didn't paste 

a second term on the prisoner in camp; if at the end of his term the 

prisoner was not automatically sent off into exile; if the prisoner 

after being released was not sent straight back to the Archipelago 

as a repeater. There is such a fence of qualifications, in fact, that, 

after all, it is only fair to recall that sometimes the nobleman . 

master too might manumit his serf out of whimsy. 

That is why, when the "Emperor Mikhail" inf~rmed us at the 

Lubyanka about the anecdotal deciphering of the initials of the 

Soviet Bolshevik Party (VKP-b) current among Moscow workers 

at that time as "Vtoroye Krepostnoye Pravo (Bolsheviks)" 

"Second Serfdom (Bolsheviks)"~this did not seem to us so 

much funny as prophetic . 

• 

They sought a new stimulus for socially useful labor. They 

thought originally it would be found in conscientiousness and 

enthusiasm along with material disinterestedness. And that is 

why they seized so eagerly on the "grea~ example" of the "subbotniki"-voluJ1.tary 

Saturdays. But this turned out not to be the 

beginning of a new era, but a tremor of self-sacrifice on the part

What the Archipelago Stands On 

I ISS 

of one of the last generations of the Revolution. It can be seen, 

for example, from provincial materials in Tambov that in 1921 

many members.of the Party were already trying to get 'out of the 

"subbotniki"-and a mark was introduced in the Party record 

book for participation in "subbotniki. '~ Yes, this outburst lasted 

another decade, enough for the Komsomols and us, the young 

Pioneers of those times. But then it came to an end for us too. 

And .what was next? Where was the stimulus to besought? 

Money, piece rates, bonus payments? But all of that carried the 

acrid smell of recent l:apitalism, and a lang perio~ was required, 

another generation, for that smell to cease to irritate, so it could 

be peaceably accepted as ''the socialist principle of material incentive." 

They dug down deeper into the storage chest of history and 

dragged out what Marx had called "extraeconomic coercion." 

Tn camp and on collective farms this discovery was presented 

with bared fangs. 

And then Frenkel came along and, like a devil sprinkling a 

poison potion into the boiling caldron, he poured in the differentiated 

ration pot. - 

There was a famous incantation repeated over and over again: 

"In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline 

of the stick on'which serfdom was based, nor t!te discipline 

of starvation on which capitalism is based." 

_ And there you are--the Archipelago managed miraculQusly 

to combine the one and the other. . 

All in all, the particular techniques required for this totaled 

three: (1) the differentiated ration pot; (2) the brigade; and (3) 

two sets of bosses. (But the third of these was not absolutely 

necessary: at Vorkuta, for example, there was only one set of 

bosses, and things hummed.) 

And so it was that the Archipelago rested on these three whales, 

these three pillars. 

Or if one considers them the driving belts, they certainly made 

the wheels turn. 

We have already explained about the differentiated ration pot. 

This was a redistribution of bread and cereals aimed at making 

our zek beat his head against the wall anti break his back for the 

average prisoner's ration, which in parasitical societies is issued 

to an inactive prisoner. To fix it so that our zek could get his 

• 

156· I TH.E GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

own lawful ration only in extra dollops of three and a half ounces 

and by being considered a shock worker. Percentages of output 

above 100 conferred the right to supplementary spoonfuls of 

kasha (those previously taken away). What a merciless knowledge 

of human nature! Neither those pieces of bread nor those 

cereal patties were comparable with the expenditure of strength 

that went .into earning them. But as one of his eternal, disastrous 

traits the human being is incapaQle of grasping the ratio of an 

object to its price. For a cheap glass of vodka a soldier is roused 

to attack in a war not his own and lays down his life; in the same 

way the zek, for those pauper's handouts, slips off a log, gets 

dunked in the icy freshet of a northern river, or kneads clay for 

mud huts barefoot in icy water, and because of this those feet 

are never going to reach the land of freedom. 

However, the satanic/!-ldifferentiated ration pot was not allpowerful. 

Not everyone took the bait. Just as serfs at one time 

or another grasped the truth that "You may have to eat less, but 

at least you won't have to break your back working," so the zeks, 

too, understood: in camp it was not the small ration that killed 

people but the big one. Lazy! Stupid! Insensible half-animals! 

They don't want that supplementary allotment of rations! They 

don't want a piece of that nourishing bread, made from a mix 

of potatoes, vetch, and water! They don't want to be released 

ahead of term! They don't even want to be posted on the Board 

of Honor! They don't want to rise to the interests of the construction 

project and the country; they don't want to fulfill the 

Five-Year Plans, -even though the Five-Year Plans are in the 

interests of the workers! They wander about the nooks and 

crannies of the mines, on the floors of construction projects, and 

they are delighted to hide from the rain in a dark hole, just anything 

in order ngt to work. 

_ Not often is it possible to arrange such mass labor projects as 

in the gravel pit 'near Yaroslavl:' there hundreds of prisoners are 

clumped together in a small area visible to the naked eyes of the 

. supervisors, and hardly has anyone of them stopped moving 

than he is immediately conspicuous. These are ideal conditions: 

no one even dares to slow down, to straighten his back, to wipe 

(}ff the sweat, until up on the hilI the flag drops-the signal for a 

smoking period. How, then, is it to be managed in other cases? 

Much thought was applied. And the brigade was invented.


Yes, and for that matter, how could we fail to invent it? In our 

country even the Narodniki-the populists-wanted to enter 

into socialism through the obshchina, the peasant commune, and 

the Marxists through the collective. And what do our newspapers 

write even nowadays? "The main thing for a human being is 

work, and it must be work in a collective!" 

And in camp there is nothing but work and only in a collective! 

Does that mean that the Corrective Labor Camp is the 

highest goal of humanity? That -the main thing . .. has been 

attained? 

How the brigade serves the psychologictiJ enrichment of its 

members, the prodding, the surveillance, and the heightened 

sense of dignity, we have already had cause to explain (in Chapter 

3). Consistent with the purposes of the brigade, worthy tasks 

and brigadiers (known in camp lingo as "bugry" -in other wor~, 

"lumps") are selected. Slave-driving the prisoners with club and 

ration, the brigadier has to cope with the bJigade in the absence 

of the higher-ups, the supervisors, and the convoy. Shalamov cites 

examples in which the whole membership of the brigade died several 

times over in the course of one gold-washing season on the 

Kolyma but the brigadier remained the same. That was the kind 

of brigadier Perelomov was in Kemerlag. He did not _ use his 

tongue, merely his stave. The list of these names would take up 

many pages here, but I have not compiled it. It is of interest that 

this _kind of brigadier most often came from the thieves, that is, 

from the lumpenproletariat. 

However, what is there to which people cannot adapt? It would 

be crude on our part not to look closely and observe how the 

brigade sometimes became a natural constituent cell of the native 

society of the Archipelago, of the same kind that the family 

is in freedom.-I myself knew such brigades--and more than one 

too. True, these were not brigades on general work---;where 

someone had to die because otherwise the rest could not survive. 

These were usually special brigades: electricians, lathe 

operators, carpenters, painters. The fewer their members (some 

ten or twelve persons), the more clearly the principle of mutual 

protection and mutual support appeared in them. 8 

6. This was manifested. too. in big brigades made up of various trades, but 

only in the bard-labor camps and under special conditions •• More about this 

in Part V. • - 


For such a brigade and .for such a role there also had to be a 

suitable brigadier: moderately hard, well acquainted with all the 

moral (immoral) laws of Gulag, perspicacious and fair within 

. the brigade; witb his own well-worked-:out method of coping 

with the higher-ups, whether it be a hoarse bark or a quiet and 

underhanded approach; he had to be feared by all the trusties 

and let no opportunity go by to grab off for the brigade an extra 

three and a half ounces, padded trousers, a pair of shoes. But 

he also had to have connections among the influential trusties 

from' whom he could learn all the camp news and impending 

changes. He needed this for correct leadership. He had to know 

the work well and the sectors which were advantageous and disadvantageous 

(and be adept at, shoving the neighboring brigade 

-if there was a neighboring brigade-onto the disadvantageous 

sectors). With a sharp eye out for the chances for ''tukhta'' and 

sensing where best to grab it off within a particular five-day work 

period: whether through manipulating work norms or total volume. 

And defend this unwaveringly against the work assigner, 

when the latter was already waiting with splattering fountain pen 

to "cut back" the work sheets. And adroit at greasing the· paw 

of the norm setter. And knowing who in his brigade was a stoolie 

(and if this stoolie was not very smart or malicious, then leaving 

him alone, since otherwise they'd-send in a worse one). And he 

always had to know whom in the brigade he should encourage 

with a glance, and whom to curse out, and to whom to give a 

lighter job that particular day. And a brigade like that with a 

brigadier like that adapts itself to austerity and survives austerely. 

There is no tenderness here, but no one dies. I worked with 

brigadiers like that-with Sinebryukhov and Pavel Boronyuk. 

And if I were to compile a list of others like them, it would be 

many pages long. And on the basis 'of many different stories 

there is a consensus that such efficient and intelligent brigadiers 

. most often originated from among the "kulak" SODS. 

But what was there to do? If they implacably forced the brigade 

on the zeks as a form of existence, then what was to be 

done? It was necessary somehow to adapt to it, was it not? We 

will die from the work, but we are able to survive ()n1y by working. 

(Of course, this is a questionable philosophy. A better answer 

would be: Don't teach me to die the way you want, but 

let me die the way I want. But they won't allow you to anyway, 

that's what. . . .)


And the choice facing the brigadier could be difficult also: if 

the logging brigade failed to fulfill the day's norm of seventy-two 

cubic yards, the brigadier went into the punishment block too. 

And if you don't want to go to the punishment block, then drive 

your brigade members to their deaths.- Bow down to the stronger! 

And the two sets of bosses were also convenient-in just the 

same way that pliers need both a right and left jaw. Two bosses 

-these were the hammer and the anvil, and they hammered out 

of the zek what the s~te required, and when he broke, they 

brushed him into the garbage bin. Even though the maintenance 

of a separate administration for the camp compound greatly increased 

the state's expenditures, and even if out of stupidity, 

caprice, and vigilance it often complicated the working process, 

nevertheless they put it there anyway, and this was no mistake. 

Two bosses--this was two tormenters instead of one, in shifts 

too, and placed in a situation of competition to see: who could 

squeeze more out of the prisoner and give ~ less. 

Production, materials, tools, transportation were in the hands 

of one boss, all that was lacking was manpower. This manpower 

was brought in every morning by the convoy from the camp and 

taken away to the camp every evening (or in shifts). During 

. those ten or twelve hours during which the zeks were in the 

hands of the production bosses there was no need to educate 

them 'or correct them, and even if they dropped dead during the 

course of the workday-this wouldn't disappoint either administration; 

corpses could be written off more easily than burned-up 

boards or stolen linseed oil. It was important for the production 

bosses to compel the prisoners to do more work in a day and to 

credit them with less in their work sheets, because it was necessary 

to make up somehow for all the fatal overexpenditures and 

. shortages on the production side; because the trusts were en-. 

gaged in stealing, and so were the Construction and Installation 

Administration, and the construction superintendents, and the 

foremen, and the work site superintendents, and the truck drivers, 

and the zeks least of all, and then not for themselves (for they 

had nowhere to tak~ the stuff) but for their camp chiefs and their 

convoy. And still more than all of that put together was lost 

through careless and negligent management and also because 

the zeks didn't take good care of anything either-and there was 

just one way to make up for all these shortages: underpayment 

for manpower. 


The camp administration, on the other hand, controlled the 

work force alone. ("Rabsila""'-and the tongue certainly knows· 

how to abbreviate!) But this was the decisive factor. The camp 

chiefs, in fact, used to say: We can squeeze them (the production 

administration) because they can't find other workers anywhere 

else. (Where could you find manpower in the taiga and the 

desert?) Consequently they sought to squeeze more money out 

in return for their "rabsila," which in part was turned over to 

the government but in part went for the maintenance of the camp 

administration itself, in return for its guarding the zeks (from 

freedom),. providing them with food and drink, dressing them, 

and morally harassing t1!em. 

Just as always in ~ur well-thought-out social system, two 

different plans collided head on here too: the production plan, 

whose objective was to have the lowest possible expenditures for 

wages, and the MVD plan, whose objective was to extract the 

largest possible earnings from. camp production. To an observer 

on the sidelines it seems strange: why set one's own plans in 

conffict with one another? Oh, but there is a profound meaning 

in it! Confficting 'plans flatten the human being. This is a principle 

which far transcends the barbed wire of the Archipelago. 

And what is also important is that these two sets of bosses are 

by no means hostile to each other, as one might think from their 

constant squabbles and mutual deceits. Where it is necessary to 

flatten someone thoroughly, they close ranks very tightly. And 

even though the camp chief is the zeks' dear father, yet he always 

willingly recognizes and signs an official affidavit that the uk 

himself was to blame for his own injury and not the contractor; 

he will not be very insistent on the zek's having work clothes 

nor demand ventilation in some section of a plant where there 

is none (well, if there' isn't, there isn't, and what can you do; 

these are temporary difficulties, and what about the siege of 

Leningrad?). The camp chief will never refuse the production 

boss when he is asked to jail a brigadier in the punishment block 

for rudeness, or a worker for having lost a shovel, or an 

engineer who hasn't carried out an order the way he should 

have. Didn't both these chiefs constitute the cream of society in 

remote settlements-were ~hey not the serf holders of taiga industry? 

And didn't their wives call on one another? 

If nonetheless there is incessant "tukhta" in padded work

What. the Archipelago Stands On I 161 

sheets; if there is a constant attestation to trenches dug and 

filled which never yawned in the earth's surface, repair of heating 

systems or lathes which were never out of order, replacement of 

perfectly sturdy posts which will still be standing there for another 

ten years-then this is done not at the instigation of the 

camp chiefs, who are . quite calm and confident that the money 

will flow to the camp one way or another anyway, but by zeks 

themselves (brigadiers, norm setters, foremen), because all state 

work norms are the same: they are calculated not for real life on 

this earth, but for some kind of unearthly ideal on the moon. A 

human being dedicated,· self-sacrificing, healthy, well nourished, 

and energetic is incapable of fulfilling those norms! And so what 

are you going to get outof a fagged-out, w~ak, hungry, anddowntrodden 

convict? The state system of setting work norms 

prescribes an output impossible on this planet-and in this sense 

resembles socialist realism in belles-lettres. But if the unsold 

books are easily shredded later, it is more complicated to cover 

up industrial "tukhta." However, it is not impossible! 

In their constant tail-chasinghaste the director. and the construction 

superintendent have, let's say, overlooked or missed 

noticing, failed to discover, the "tukhta." And the free foremen 

were either illiterate or drunk, or else well disposed to the zeks 

(with the expectation, of course, that in a difficult moment the 

zek brigadier would help them out). And by then the "percentage 

bonus had been eaten up," and you couldn't pull the bread back 

out of the belly. Accountants' inspections and audits are notorious 

for their. clumsiness. They turn up "tukhta" after a delay of 

months or years, when the money paid out for the work has long 

since flitted away and all that can still be done is to bring charges 

against one of the free employees or else smudge it up and write 

it off. . . 

Three pillars on which the Archipelago is propped were set 

there by the Leadership: the differentiated ration pot, the work 

brigade, and ·the two sets of bosses. And the fourth and main 

pillai' was ''tukhta,'' and it was put there by the Archipelago 

natives and by life itself. 

For ''tukhta'' it is essential to have energetic, enterprising 

brigadiers, but production chiefs from among the zeks are even 

more necessary. No few of them were foremen, norm setters, 

planners, economists, because you just wouldn't drag free people 


off tG those distant places. Some zeks in those positions forgot 

who they were, became more cruel th~ .free workers, trampled 

on their brother prisoners, and made their way over dead bodies 

to their own release ahead of term. Others, on the contrary, retained 

a distinct consciousness of their motherland, the Archipelago, 

and introduced reasonable moderation in the management 

of production and a reasonable share of "tukhta" in their accounting. 

There was a risk for them in this: not the risk of getting a new 

-- term, because the terms were already piled high anyway and 

tb,eir Code articles were harsh, but the risk of losing their position, 

angering the chiefs, landing in a bad prisoner transportand 

thus perishing silently. And therefore their staunchness and 

intelligence were all the more glorious in that they helped their 

brothers to survive. 

Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov, for example, whose acquaintance 

we have already made in connection with the Kady trial, was that 

kind of. person. Throughout his whole long sentence (he served 

nineteen years without any interruption) he retained that same 

stubborn self-assurance which characterized his conduct . during 

the trial and with which he had mocked Kalinin and the commutation 

of his death sentence. Through all these years, when 

he was dried up from starvation and breaking his back on 

general work, he perceived himself not as a scapegoat but as a 

genuine political. prisoner and even as a "revolutionary,". as he 

used to describe himself in heart-to-heart conversations. And 

when, thanks to his naturally sharp administrative grasp, which 

in his case substituted for his incomplete schooling in economics, 

he held jobs as a trusty in production posts, Vlasov sought not 

only to postpone his own dea~ but also the chance to patch up 

the whole cart so it was easier for the rest of the fellows to pull 

it along .. 

In the forties, on one of the Ust-Vym logging camp sites (and 

UstVymlag was distinct from the general pattern in that it had 

only one unified set of bosses: the camp itself ran its logging, did 

its own auditing, and was responsible for plan fulfillment to the 

Ministry of the Timber Industry), Vlasov simultaneously combined 

the duties of norm setter and planner. He was the head 

of the whole thing there, and in winter, in order to provide 

support for the sloggers out logging, he credited their brigades 

with fictitious cubic yards of wood cut. One of the winters was

What the Archipelago·Stands On 163 

particularly severe; and working just as hard as they could the 

zeks fulfil~d the work norms by only 60 percent but received 

rations for having fulfilled 125 percent of norm; and with the 

help of these beefed-up rations they managed to last out the 

winter without halting work even one day. However, shipments 

of the "felled" (on paper) timber were far behind schedule, and 

the camp chief heard some evil rumors. In March he sent a commission 

of foremen into the woods-and they turned up a 

shortage of 10,500 cubic yards of timber! The enraged chief 

summoned Vlasov, who heard him out and then said to him: 

"Give 'em, chief, five days in the brig. They're all sluts. They were 

too lazy to get out into the woods because the snow there is still 

deep. Set up a new commission with me as the chairman." And 

thereupon, with his own sensible troika, Vlasov, without leaving 

his office, drew up an official document and "found" all the 

missing timber. The ~hief was quieted down for the time being; 

but in May there was more trouble: they were still shipping out 

too little timber, and the higher-ups kept asking questions. So the 

chief called in Vlasov again. Vlasov was a short fellow, but he 

always retained his vigorous rooster-like bearing, and this time 

. he didn't even pretend: the timber just didn't exist. "So how 

could you have drawn up a false document, blankety, blank, 

blank, blank!" Vlasov replied: "Do you think it would have 

been better for you to go to jail yourself? After all, ten and a half 

thousand .cubic yards is a full ten-ruble bill for a free employee, 

and even for a Chekist it's a fiver." The chief cursed him out, but 

by this time it was too late to punish Vlasov; the whole thing 

depended on him. "Well, what's to be done now?" Vlasov 

answered: "Just wait till the roads have completely dissolved in 

mud." And the time came when the winter roads had all dissolved 

completely, and the summer logging trails were still impassable 

too. And at this point Vlasov brought the chief a detailed 

and watertight report for his signature, to be sent on to 

the administration higher-up. In it he proved that because of the 

highly successful timber-felling operations of the past winter 

it had been quite impossible to move 10,500 cubic yards out of 

the forests on the sledge trails. Neither could this timber be 

hauled out through the swampy forests. Next he gave estimates 

for the cost of a corduroy road to get the timber out, and he 

proved that the haulage would cost more than the timber 


was worth. So that in a ye!lr's time, because the logs were going 

to be lying there In the swamp for a whole summer and autumn, 

they would be unsuitable for lumber and acceptable to any possible 

customer only for firewood. And the administration agreed 

with these literate conclusions, which they were not ashamed to 

show any other commission-and therefore the whole 10,500 

cubic yards of timber were written off. 

And so it was that the trees were felled, and eaten up, and 

written off-and stood once again erect and proud in their green 

coniferous. garb. And, in fact, the state paid very reasonably 

for these dead cubic yards: a few hundred extra loaves of black, 

gluey, watery bread. The thousands of trees and the hundreds 

of lives which were saved were of no account on the profit-andloss 

sheet. Becau~e this kind of wealth was never counted in the 

Archipelago. . 

In all probability Vlasov was not the only one who' had been 

so perspicacious as to play the swindler, because. from 1947 on 

they introduced a new system in all logging operations: complex 

work gangs and complex work brigades. And now the lumberjacks 

were combined with the teamsters in one work gang, and 

the brigade was only credited with timber hauled out to the 

"slide" on the .riyer bank, to the site of the spring log drive. 

And so what happened then? Did this burst the balloon of 

the "tukhta"? Hardly! It even flourished! It expanded out of 

necessity, and the mass of workers nourished on it grew larger 

and larger. For those among our readers who are not bored with 

this, let's go into it more deeply: 

1. The zeks were not permitted to accompany the logs 

farther than the ~lide on the river bank. (Who would convoy 

them down the river? Vigilance!) Therefore an expediter of 

the log-rafting office, which was staffed with free lumberjacks, 

accepted the timber from the camp dispatcher (for all the 

brigades) at the river. Well, now, he, of course, was strict in 

his receipts? Not at all. The camp dispatcher would inflate the 

figures as much as he had to on behalf of the logging brigades, 

and the expediter of the log-rafting office was agreeable to the 

whole deal. 

2. And here js why. The log-rafting office also had the 

problem of feeding its own free workers and their work norms 

were eq~aly impossible. And the log-rafting office listed all


of this nonexistent, fictitious timber as, having been rafted 

downriver. 

3. At the general landing and sorting point downriver 

where the timber was collected from all the iogging sectors, 

there was a bourse, which was a landing area for logs. Here 

again zeks were doing th~ work, attached to that selfsame 

UstVymIag (the fifty-two ~'islands" of UstVymIag were scattered 

over a territory 96 miles square---now that is what our 

Archipelago is like!). The dispatcher of the log-rafting office 

was quite at ease: the camp expediter would no~ accept back 

all the "tukhta"-in the second place so as not to betray his 

own camp, which had previously "delivere4" it to the slide, 

and in the first place so as to feed its own prisoners working at 

the landing point with that same fictitious timber! (They, too, 

had t1!eir own fantastic work norms and they needed their 

crust too!) At this point, however, the camp expediter hfl(l to 

toil a bit for the sake'of society: he not only had to 'accept the 

timber by total volume but also list it, existing and fictitious, 

by diameters and lengths, in a complete schedule. Now here 

was a benefactor for you! (VIasov worked at this job top.) 

4. After the "bourse" came the sawmiIl which processed 

the logs into cut lumber. Once more the workers were zeks. 

The brigades were given rations on the basis of their volume 

of raw timber processed, and the "extra" fictitious timber was 

just exactly what they needed in order to increase their own 

percentage output. 

5. Next came the lumber yard for the completed product, 

which was required, according to state norms, to have,65 percent 

of the amount of raw timber received by the sawmill. 

Thus it was that 65 percent of, the fictitious timber moved 

invisibly into the lumber yard (and the mythical lumber was 

likewise inventoried by sorts: wavy-edged slab, construction 

lumber; by thickness of board, edged, unedged). The lumberyard 

workers, too, got their food out of that same fictitious 

timber. 

But what happened then? The fictitious lumber was shut up in 

the lumber yard, where it was guarded by the Camp Guard. And 

there could not be any more uncontroIled "losseS." And who 

at this point was going to answer for the "tukhta"? And how? 

At this point another great principle of the Archipelago came 


to the aid of the principle of "tukhta." This was the principle of 

rubber, in other words stretching things out with interminable 

delays. Once on the books, the fictitious production kept being 

carried over from one year to another. Whenever there was inventory-taking. 

in this vyild Archipelago backwoods, all tho;e 

engaged in it were, after all, friends and all understood. You 

wouldn't go around moving every board in the place just for the 

sake of the audit. And fortunately a certain percentage of 

fictitious lumber could "spoil" from being kept too long and 

could be written off. And they would fire one manager of the 

lumber yard and then another and put them to work as worknorm 

setters. And how many' people had been fed in the meanwhile! 

Here is what they tried to do too: when they loaded lumber into 

railroad cars for shipment to buyers (there was no customer 

expediter up there, and the railroad cars would subsequently be 

scattered all over the country on the basis of bills of ladi9g), they 

tried similarly to "ship" the fictitious lumber as well, in other 

words to inflate the amount shipped (and this fed the stevedore 

brigades, let's note). The railroad put a seal on the car. It 

couldn't care less. After a certain length of time somewhere 

in Armavir or Krivoi Rog they would break the seal on the car 

and open it up, and document the amount actually received. If 

the underweight was moderate, then all these differences in 

volume would be collected in some schedule or other and it would 

be up to the State Planning Commission to account for them. 

If the underweight was outrageous, the recipient would send a 

claim to UstVymlag, but these claims moved in a flood of millions 

of other papers and were stapled in a file somewhere and in time 

. simply went out like a light. After all, they simply could not 

stand up against people's pressure to live. (And no one was going 

to send the carload of lumber back from Armavir: you took 

what you got-there was no timber in the South.) 

Now let us note the fact that the state and the Ministry of 

the Timber Industry made serious use in their economic reports 

of these fictitiously inflated figures for the production of cut and 

processed timber. They were useful to the Ministry too. 7 

But probably the most surprising thing was this: it would seem 

7. And this is how "tukhta," like many of the Archipelago's problems. could 

not be kept confined to it, but acquired a nationwide significance.


that there should have been a shortage of timber because of the 

fictitious inflation of quantities at every stage of its movement. 

However, the fact was that the expediter at the landing "bourse" 

managed to add so much fictitious timber to deliveries in the 

course of the summer season that by fall the timber-rafting office 

had surpluses. waiting in the water! They had no, been touched. 

And they must not be left in the river for the winter, because 

if they were, it would be neces~aiy in the spring to call in a plane 

to bomb them loose. And therefore this surplus timber which no 

one needed was allowed in late autumn to float downstream into 

the White Sea! 

Is that miraculous? Strange and wonderful? But it didn't just 

happen in one place. At the lumber yards in Unzhlag there was 

always surplus lumber left over which hadn't been loaded into 

railroad cars, and which was no longer listed as belonging to 

anyone anywhere! And for years after some lumber yard had 

been total~y shut down people would subsequently journey to 

it fmm nearby camps for ownerless dry firewood, and bum in 

their stoves the stripped pit props which had taken so much 

suffering to produce. 

And all this was a matter of attempting·to survive, not to enrich 

oneself, and certainly not to plunder the state. 

The state cannot be so excessively fierce-and force its subjects 

into deceit. 

. And here is what the prisoners used to say: "Without 'tukhta' 

and ammonal, never could we have built the canal!" 

So all that is what the Archipelago stands on. 

Chapter 6 

• 

"They've Brought the 

Fascists!" 

"They've brought the Fascists! They've brought the Fascists!" 

the young zek lads and girls shouted excitedly, running through 

the camp when our two trucks, each loaded with thirty Fascists, 

entered the perimeter of the smaIl rectangle. of the Novy 

IyerusaIim* Camp. 

We had just experienced one of the supreme hours of our life 

-the one hour's drive from Moscow's Krasnaya Presnya 

Prison-what is called a short-distance prisoner transport. 

Though we had spent the ride with our knees hunched up in 

the rear of the trucks, nonetheless all the air, the speed, the colors 

were ours. Oh, -forgotten brightness of the world! The streetcars 

were red, the· trolley-buses sky-blue, the crowd in white and 

many-colored. Do they themselves see these colors as they crowd 

onto-the buses? And on top of this today, for some reason, alI 

the buildings and the lampposts· were decorated with banners 

and streamers, some sort of unexpected holiday-August 14, 

coinciding with the holiday of our liberation from prison. (On 

this day the capitulation of Japan had been announced, ending 

the seven-day war.) On the Volokolamsk Highway a whirlwind' 

of scents of new-mown hay and of the early evening freshness 

af the meadows swirled around our shaven heads. This meadow 

breeze-who could breathe it in more greedily than prisoners? 

'. Real genuine green blinded our eyes, grown used to gray and 

more gray. I turned up on the transport with Gammerov and 

J68 

p

"They've Brought the Fascists!" I 169 

Ingal, and we sat next to each other, and it seemed to us as if 

we were going to a gay dacha-a country· house. The end of 

such a bewitching journey could not be something dismal. 

And then we jumpe4 from the trucks, stretched our numbed 

legs and backs, and looked around. We liked the compound of 

NOVY Iyerusalim. It was even attractive: it was surrounded not 

by a solid fence but merely by an interwoven barbed-wire fence, 

and in every direction were visible the hilly, lively village and 

dacha countryside of the Zvenigorod land. It was as if we were 

part of that gay milieu; we could see the earth just like those 

who came here to rest and enjoy themselves, and we could even 

see it on a larger, deeper scale (for our eyes had grown used to 

flat walls, flat sleeping boards, and shallow cells), and to us it 

seemed even more succulent: the greenery which had faded' by 

mid-August blinded us, and perhaps, too, it sem~d tb have so 

much succulence because the sun was setting. . \ 

"So you are the Fascists? Are all of you Fascists?" the approaching 

zeks asked us hopefully. And having confirmed th!lt 

yes, we were the Fascists-they immediately scurried off and left 

the scene. There was nothing else about us that interested them. 

. (We already knew, of course, that "the Fascists" was a nickname 

for the 58's, introduced by the sharp-eyed thieves and very 

much approved of by the chiefs; previously they had well named 

the 58's-KR's. But then all that had grown stale, and a catchy 

label was needed.) . 

After our swift trip in the fresh air, here it seemed warmer, 

and because of that cozier .. We were still looking around the 

tiny compound, with its two-story building of brick for men, and 

. !b~ women's buiknng, which was wooden with an attic story, 

and some peasant-style tumble-down sheds for auxiliary services; 

and then at the long black shadows which lay everywhere in the 

fields, cast by the trees and the buildings, and at the high chimney 

of the brickyard, and at the already flaming windows of its two 

buildings. 

''Well? Things aren't so bad here, it seems .... " We spoke to 

one another, trying to convince each other and ourselves. 

One young fellow, with that sharply alert and hostile expression 

which we had already begun to notice in others, lingered 

near us longer than the rest, inspecting the Fascists with interest. 

His well-worn black cap sat crookedly forward on his forehead. 


He kept his hands in his pocKets, and he stood there just like 

that, listening to our chatter.· 

''Not bad!" His chest shook. Twisting his lips, he looked us 

over contemptuously once again and hurled out: "Star-va-tion 

station! You'll kick the bucket!" 

And spitting under our feet, he went out. He found it unbearable 

to listen any longer to such idiots. 

Our hearts fell. 

The first night in camp! You are already being borne, borne 

along a slippery slide down, down-and somewhere there must 

be still a saving protruding ledge which you have to catch hold of, 

but you don't know where it is. Everything that was worst in your 

entire upbringing has come alive inside. you-everything suspicious, 

gloomy, grasping, cruel, instilled there by hungry queues, 

by the blatant injustice of the strong. This worst in you has been 

even more aroused, even more stirred up inside you, by the 

preceding rumors about the camps: just don't get put on general 

work! The wolfish camp world! Here they tear you to pieces 

alive! Here they stomp on he who has stumbled! Just don't 

go on general work! But how can you avoid it? Which way is 

one to flee? One has to give something! One has to give to someone! 

But what in particular? And to whom? And how is it done? 

Not an hour has gone by-and a fellow aboard our same 

transport comes up with a restrained sInile: he has been named 

a construction engineer in the camp compound. And one more: 

he has been given permission to open a barbershop for the free 

lV0l'kers ·at the factory. And yet another:. he ran into an old 

,ecnatnta~ and he is going to go to work in the planning 

.n0itc~ Your heart winces: all this is skin off your back! They 

will survive in the offices and the barbershops. And you will 

perish. Perish. 

The compound. Two hundred paces from barbed wire to 

barbed wire, and you can't go close to it either. Yes, all around. 

you the Zvenigorod hills' will gleam green, but in here is a 

starvation mess hall, and a stone dungeon for a penalty isolator, 

and a miserable lean-to over a burner for "individual cooking," 

a rotten shed of a bath, a gray booth of a tumble-down latrine 

with rotting seats, and-nowhere to hide from it. This was it. 

Perhaps this little island would be the last piece of earth in your 

life which your feet were destined to tromp on.


In all the. rooms bare multiplebunks-"vagonki"-were installed 

.. The multiple bunk was the invention of the Archipelagq, 

an adaptation for the sleep of the natives never encountered 

anywhere else in the world: two stories of four wooden. panels 

on two cross-shaped supports placed... at the head and at the feet. 

When one sleeper stirred . . • three others rocked. 

They did not issue mattresses in this camp,nor sacks tostuif 

with straw. The words "bed linen" were unknown to the natives 

of the Novy Iyeruslll:im island; no sheets or pillowcase!! exi&ted 

here; and they did not issue or launder underwear. Youhad'what 

yoqwore, and you had to look lifter it yourself. And the man,ager 

of camp property had never heard the word ''pillow.'' The only 

-pUlo\ys were those you owned, and were had only by women and· 

thieves. In the evening, when y~u lay down on ~e naked panel, 

. you could take off your shoes. Bu.t. take into consideliltion that 

your Shoes would be swiped. Better sleep with shoes on .. Better 

not scatter your clothes about either-they'd swipe them too. 

On going out to work in-the morning you must" not leave an,ything 

in the barracks; whatever the thieves did not bother to take 

the jailers. would, announcing, "It's forbidden!" In· the. morning 

you would go out ·to work just as. nomads depart from a ca,mp 

site, leaving it even cleaner: you would leave neithef the ashes 

from your bonfirc;s nor the bones of devoured animals; the room 

would be empty, totally bare, and you could even tpm it over 

for others to occupy. And your own sleeping panel would have 

nothing to distinguish it from all the others: bare, greasy, polished 

by bodies. . , 

But ypu couldn't cart anything off to work with you either. 

You would gather up your chattels in the morning. stand in 

line at the storeroom for personal belongings, and hide them in 

a bag or a suitcase. You'd return from work and stand in line 

again at th(l storeroom and take with you what yo~ could foresee 

you would want overnight. Better not make a mistake, because 

you'd not get to the storeroom a second time . 

. And thus-for ten years! Hold your head high! 

The monpn,g shift returned to camp sometime after two. They 

washed up, 'had lunch, stood in line at the storerom~d the 

bell rang for roll call. Everyone in the camp formec;l up in.rows, 

and an illiterate jailer with a plywood board went around, 

slobbering on his pencil, wrinkling up his forehead wisely, an,d 


whispering over and over. He recounted the line-up several times, 

he went oyer all the buildings several times, leaving the line-up 

standing there. Either he was wrong iii his arithmetic or he was 

confused as to how many were ill, and how many were imprisoned 

in the ShIzo under orders "not -to be allowed out" This senseless 

expenditure of time kept dragging on for a long while-an hour, 

sometimes an hour' and a half. And those to whom time was 

precious-even though this need is not very developed in our 

people and not at all among zeks-those who even in camp 

wanted to accomplish something, felt themselves particularly 

helpless and humiliated. It was forbidden to read "in lin~-up." 

My boys; Gammerov and Ingal, stood with closed eyes, composing 

either verses or prose or letters-but you were not permitted 

to stand like that in line-up because it looked as though you were 

sleeping and this was an insult to the roll call, and furthermore 

your ears were not closed, and the mother oaths and the stupid 

jokes and the dismal conversations-all kept swarming in. (The 

year was 1945 and Norbert. Wiener would soon formulate 

cybernetics; the atom had already been split-and here palefaced 

intellectuals were standing in a row waiting to hear the 

command, "Standstill, do~'t turn!"-while the stupid, redmugged 

idiot lazily whispered his total!) The toll call was coll). 

pleted, and now, at 5:30, one could go and lie down and take a 

nap. (because the night before had been short and the coming 

night right be even shorter). However, dinner would be in an 

hour. The time was all cut up into bits. 

The camp administration was so lazy and so untalented it did 

not eveIi have the desire and initiative to separate the workers on 

the three different shifts into different rooms. From seven to 

eight, after dinner, the first shift could have begun to rest, but 

those who were fe4 and fresh wanted no part of peace, and 

the thieves on .their feather comforters were just beginning their 

card games, their yelling, and their little dramatic numbers. 

One thief of an Azerbaizariian type, creeping up in an exaggerated 

way, made the rounds of the room by jumping from bunk to 

bunk on the upper panels and roared out at the sloggers: "That's 

how Napoleon went to Moscow for tobacco." Having got himself 

tobacco he returned by the same route, stepping on and across 

people and shouting: "That's how Napoleon fled to Paris." Every 

escapade of the thieves was so astonishing and Unusual that we

- -- -~-~ ~- 

"They've Brought the Fascists!" 173 

could only gape at them. From nine in the evening, the night 

shift was shaking the bunks, tramping abQut, making preparations 

to leave, and taking their things off to the storeroom. They were 

marched out at 10 P.M,-at last it seemed we could sleep! But 

after ten the day shift returned. And now they were the ones 

tramping heavily about, shaking the bunks, washing up, going 

for things in.the storeroom, and getting dinner. Only from perhaps 

half-past eleven on did the exhausted camp sleep. 

But at a quarter after four the ring of singing metal was wafted 

. over our small camp and across the sleepy collective farm around 

us, where the old folks stilI remember very well the chimes ofthe 

Istra church bells. Perhaps our silver-voiced camp bell came 

, from the monastery also and had grown uSed, while there, to 

getting the monks up for prayer and work at the sound of the 

first cockcrow. 

"Get up, first shift!" the jailer .shouted infb-each room. Head 

dizzy from insufficient sleep, eyes still not unglued~no chance 

to wash! And you don't have to get dressed. That's how you slept. 

So straight off to, the mess hall. You enter, stilI staggering with 

sleep. Everyone pushes ahead and is absolutely -certain of what 

he wants. Some rush for their bread ration, othet:S for gruel. 

You are the only one wandering about like a lunatic, beneath the 

dim lamps, unable in the steam of the gruel to see where to find 

either bread or gruel. Finally you receive nineteen and a quarter 

ounces of bread fit for a feast and an earthenware -bowl with 

something hot and black. This is "black cabbage soup"-made 

from nettles. The black shreds of the boiled leaves lie in the 

blackish empty water. Tliere is no fish, meat, nor fat. Not even 

salt: in cooking, the nettles soak up all the salt thrown in -and 

therefore they don't put any in. H tobacco is camp gold, then 

salt is camp silver, and the cooks save it up. Unsalted nettIe 

soup is It. repulsive poison! You are hungry, but you can't pour 

it into yourself. 

Lift up your eyes. Not to the heavens but to the ceiling. Your 

eyes have already grown accustomed to the dim lamps and you 

can now make out along the wall the long slogan written on.wall 

_ paper in the favorite red letters: 

"WHotVER. DOES NOT WORK DOES NOT EAT!" 

And goose pimples run up. and down your chest. Oh, wise 

men from the Cultural and Educational Section! How satisfied 


you were when you sought out that great evangelical and Communist 

slogan-for the camp mess hall. But in the Gospel of St. 

Luke it says:. "The labourer is worthy of his hire." And in the 

Book of Deuteronomy it "says: "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox 

when hetreadeth out the com." " 

And what you have is an exclamation point! Thank you on 

behalf of the ox treading out the com! And henceforth I will 

understand that you are not at all squeezing my emaciated neck 

because of shortages, that you are choking me not simply out of 

greed-but out of the bright principle of the onrushing society! 

Except that I do not see in camp those who work eating. Arid I do 

not see in camp those who don't work. ".. starving. "" " 

Day is breaking. The predawn August heavens,grow pale. 

Only the brightest of the stars are still visible in the sky. To 

the southeast, above the brickyard where we will now be taken, 

ate Procyon and Sirius-the alpha. stars of Canis Minor" and 

Canis Major. Everything has abandoned us along with the 

jailers, even the heavens: the dogs in the heavens, like those 

on earth, are on the leashes of gua,rds. The dogs bark madly. 

leap ahead, try to get at us. They are gloriously trained on human 

meat. 

The first day in camp! I do not wish even my worst enemy 

that day! The folds of the brain are all mixed up because of the 

impossibility of absorbing the entire scope of the cruelty. How 

will it be? What will happen tome? My head keeps grinding it 

over and over. And the newcomers are all given the most meaningless 

work possible, just to keep them busy while things are 

sorted o~t. An endless day. You carry hand barrows or you push 

wheelbarrows along, and with each wheelbarrow load the day 

grows shorter by five or ten minutes only, and your mind remains 

free solely in order to keep turning over and over: How will it 

be? How will it be? 

We see the absurdity of rolling this waste along. and we try 

to chat between wheelbarrows. It seems as if we have already 

become exhausted from" those very first wheelbarrow loads, we 

have already given ·them our strength~d how are we going 

to go Oil pushing them for eight years? We try to talk about 

something in which we can feel our strength and our individuality. 

Ingal describes the funeral of Tynyanov, whose pupil he considers' 

himself-and we argue about historical novels: Ought anyone 

dare write them? After all, an historical novel is a novel about

"They've Brought the FQscists!" 1 175 

things the author never saw. Burdened by distance and the 

maturity of his own era, the author can try as much as he pleases 

to convince himself that he has come to comprehend, but, after 

all, all the. same he is unable to live it, and does this mean that an 

historical novel is first of all fantasy? 

At this point they began to call into the office the zeks from 

the new prisoner transport, several at a time, for their assignments, 

and all of us left our wheelbarrows. The previous day 

Ingal had managed to get to know somebody-and as a result 

he, a literary person, was assigned to the factory bookkeeping 

office, even though he got figures ridiculously mixed up, and .in 

all his born days had never done calculations on an abacus. 

Gammerov was incapable of begging and grabbing off a spot 

even to save his life. He was made an unskilled laborer. He came 

over, lay doWn on the grass, and during this . last little hour in 

which he didn't have to be an unskilled laborer he told me about 

the persecuted poet Pavel Vasilyev, of whom I had never heard 

a word. When had these boys managed to read and learn so 

much? 

I bit on a stalk of grass and wavered-which. of my caids 

shOUld I play-mathematics or my experience as, an officer? 1 

was unable ta-withdraw proudly like Boris. Once I had been 

broughf up with other ideals, but from the thirties cruel life 

had rubbed us in only one direction: to go after and g~t. . 

And it happened. quite naturally that when I crossed the 

threshold of the brickyard director's office I had tucked the 

stomach fold in my field shirt beneath my b~ad officer's belt 

along the sides. (And I had intentionally dressed up for this day 

too, disregarding the fact that I was to wheel a wheelbarrow.) 

My high collar was severely buttoned up. 

"Ali officer?" the director immediately surmised. 

"Yes, sir!" 

"Do you have experience working with people?"l 

"I do." 

ta~' did you command?" 

"An artillery battalion." (I lied on the wing--a battery seemed 

too small to me.) He looked at me with both trust and doubt. 

"And will you manage here? It's hard here." 

"I think rn manage!" I replied. (After an, I didn't understand 

1. Om:e more "with people," please note. 


myself what a noose II was sticking my neck into. The main thing 

was to go after and get.) He squinted a bit and thought.. (He 

was calculating how ready I was to remake myself into a dog 

and whether my jaw was firm.) , 

"All right. You will be a shift foreman in the clay pit." 

And one other former officer, Nikolai Akimov, 'was also 

named a foreman in the clay pit. He and I went 'out of the office 

feeling kinship, gladness. We could not have understood then, 

even had we been told, that we had chosen the standard-for 

army men-servile beginning of a sentence. It was clear from 

Akimov's unintellectual and unassuming face that he was an 

open lad and a good soldier. 

"What's the director scaring us with? Does he think we can't 

cope with twenty men? There's no mine field and no one is 

bombing us-what can't we cope with?" 

We wanted to recreate inside ourselves our former front-line 

Self-assurance. We were pups and we did not understand to what 

extent the Archipelago was unlike the front, to what degree 

its war of siege was more difficult than our war of explosives. 

In the army even a fool and a nonentity can command, and, 

in fact, the higher the post he occupies, the greater will be his 

success. While a squad commander has to have a quick grasp of 

things, inexhaustible energy and courage, and understanding of 

the soldier's heart-it is quite enough for one marshal or another 

to be peevish, to curse, and to be able to sign his name. Everything 

else will be done for him, and the plan of operations will 

be brought him by the operations section of his staff, some bright 

officer with an unknown name. The soldiers will execute the 

orders not because they are convinced of their correctness (for 

often it is precisely the reverse), but because orders come from 

top to bottom through the hierarchy, and they are the orders of 

a machine, and whoever does not carry them out will have his 

head cut off. 

But in the Archipelago it is not at all like that for the zek who 

has been appointed to command other zeks. The whole golden 

shoulder-board hierarchy is not towering behind your back and 

not at all supporting your orders; it will betray you and toss you 

out as soon as you're unable to carry out those orders with your 

own strength, your own skilL And the skill here is: either your 

fist, or pitiless destruction through starvation, or such a pro-


found knowledge of the Archipelago that your order alSo appears 

to each prisoner as his own salvation. 

A greenish Arctic moisture has to replace the warm blood 

inside you-only then can you command zeks. 

And right then, during those very days, they started to bring 

from the ShIzo-the Penalty Isolator-to the clay pit, as the 

heaviest work of all, a penalty brigade-a group of thieves who 

just a bit earlier had almost cut the throat of the camp chief. 

(They had not wanted to cut his throat, because they were not 

such fools as that, but to frighten him so he would send them 

back to Krasnaya Presnya; they recognized Novy Iyerusalim as 

a deadly place where you'd never get enough to eat.) They 

were brought in at the end of my shift. They lay down in the 

clay pit in a sheltered spot, bared their short, thick arms and . 

legs, their fat tattooed stomachs and chests, and lay there sunning 

themselves, content to be out of the wet cellar of the ShIzo. I 

went up to them in mY.military attire and precisely, properly; 

. proposed that they set to work. The sun put them in a benign 

mood, and therefore they only laughed and sent me to the wellknown 

mother. I was enraged and confused and departed emptyhanded. 

In the army I would have begun with the order "Stand 

up!" But here it was quite clear that if anyone of them did stand 

- up-it would be solely to stick a knife in my ribs. And while I was 

cudgeling my brains over what to do {after all,the rest of the 

clay pit was watching and might also quit work)-my shift came 

to an end. Only thanks to this circumstance am I here today to 

write this study of the Archipelago. . 

I was I"q'laced by AkiDiov. The thieves continued to lie there 

sunning themselves. He gave them one order, the second time 

he shouted a command at them (maybe even "Stand up'''), and 

the third time he threatened them with the camp chief-and 

they chased him, and in a low spot in the clay pit knocked him 

down and smashed him in the kidneys with a crowbar. He was 

taken directly from the factory. to the provincial prison hospital, 

and this brought his career as a commander to an end and maybe 

his prison sentence ·and maybe his life. (In all probability, the 

director had appointed us as dummies to be beaten up by these 

thieves.) 

My own short career at the clay pit lasted several days longer 

than Akimov's, but brought me not the satisfaction I had expected, 

178. I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

only a constant spiptual depression. At 6 A.M. I entered the 

working compound more deeply despondent than if I had been 

going there to dig the clay myself. I wandered- around the clay 

pit like one quite lost, hating both it and my own role in it. 

From the wet pressing mill to the clay pit there was a trolley 

track. At the spot where the level area ended and its rails dipped 

into the workings, a windlass stood on a platform. This motordriven 

windlass was one of the few miracles of mechanization in 

the whole brickyard. Along the entire line from clay pit to windlass 

and from the windlass io the pressing mill, the sloggers had 

to push the cars loaded with clay. Only on the rise out of the 

clay pit were the cars-dragged up by the windlass. The clay pit 

occupied a distant corner of the brickyard compound, and it was 

a surface plowed up by cave-ins-the cave-ins branching ofr"in 

all directions like ravines, leaving between them untouched 

prominences. The clay lay right up to the surface, and the 

stratum was not thin. One could probably have mined it deep 

down or else across its whole width continuously, but no one 

knew how it should be done, and no one made a plan for 

mining it, and it all was managed by the brigadier of the morning 

shift, Barlnov-a cocky young Muscovite, a nonpolitical 

offender with a pretty face. Barinov worked the clay pit simply 

where it was most convenient; he excavated where the most clay 

could be dug for the least work. He never went too deep--so 

the cars wouldn't have to be pushed up too steep a slope. 

Properly speaking, Barinov was. in charge of all eighteen to 

twenty men who worked during my shift in""1he clay pit. He was 

the only genuine boss of shift: he knew the lads, he fed them, 

in other words got for them big rations, and each day wisely 

decided himself how many cars of clay were to be delivered so 

that there would be neither too few nor too many. I liked Barinov, 

and if I had been somewhere in prison with him as a bunk 

neighber, we would have got along very gaily. And we could 

have got along right here too. I should have gone to him and 

had a big laugh with him over the fact that the director had appointed 

me to the position of intermediate watchdog-while I 

understood nothing. But my officer's training did not permit this! 

And I tried to maintain a severe bearing with him and to get 

him to knuckle under, though not only I, and not only he, but 

the entire brigade, could see that I was as much of a useless


meddler as a District Party instructor during crop sowing. It 

made Barinov angry that they had installed a stuffed shirt over 

him, and more than once he mocked me cleverly in front of the 

brigade. In the case of anything I considered necessary to do 

he immediately proved to me that it was impossible. On the other 

hand, loudly shouting, "Foreman! Foreman!" he would on occasion 

summon me to various corners of the clay pit and ask me 

for instructions: how to take up the old trolley tracks and lay new 

ones again; how a wheel that had jumped off the axle should be 

put back again; or what to do about the allegedly nonfunctioning 

windlass; or where the shovels should be taken to be sharpened. 

Already weakening from day to day in my impulse to command, 

in the face of his ridicule, I was by then quite happy if he simply 

ordered the fellows. to dig that morning (he didn't always do it) 

and did not annoy me with his vexatious questions. 

Thereupon I quietly kept out of the way and hid from my 

subordinates and my chiefs behind the hign piles of earth that 

had been carted away, set myself down on the ground and sat 

stock-still with sinking heart. My spirit was numb from my 

first few days in camp. Oh, this was not prison! Prison has wings! 

Prison is a treasure house of thought. It was gay and. easy to 

starve and argue in prison. And just try that here-ten years of 

starvation, work, and silence. Just try it! The iron caterpillar 

track was already dragging me to the grinder. I was helpless. I 

didn't know how, but I wanted to slip off to one side. To catch 

my breath. To come to myself. To lift my head and to see. 

Over there, beyond the barbed wire, across a vale, was a knoll. 

On it was a little village-ten houses. The rising sun illuminated 

it with its peaceful rays. So close to us-and the very opposite 

of a camp! (For that matter, it, too, was a camp, but one for~ 

gets that.) For a long time there was no motion at all there, but 

then a woman walked by with a pail, and a tiny child ran across 

the weeds in the street. A cock crowed and a cow. mooed. And 

there in the clay pit we could hear everything perfectly. And a 

mongrel barked-what a lovely voice that was too! It was not a 

cQnvoy dog!2 

2. When there are discussions about universal disarmament, I am always 

quite concerned; after all, no one has inchlded guard dogs in the lists of forbidden 

weapons. And yet they make life more insufferable for human beings 

than do rockets. 

180 I THE GULAG AR.CHIPELAGO 

And from every sound there and from the very immobility it~ 

self a holy peace flooded into my soul. And I know for certain 

that if they should say to me at that very moment: That's your 

freedom! Just live in that village until your death! Renounce 

cities and the vanities of this world, your passing fancies, your 

convictions, the truth-renounce it all. and live in that village 

(but not as a collective farmer!), look at the sun every morning 

and harken to the roosters! Are you willing? ... Oh, not only 

willing, but, g~ Lord, please send me a life like that! I felt that 

I would be unable to last out in camp.- 

On the other side of the brickyard, invisible to me at the 

- moment, a passenger train roared by on the Rzhev Line. In the 

clay pit they shouted: "The' Trusties' Train!" Every train was 

familiar. They kept time by them. "The Trusties' Train" passed 

• by at a quarter to nine, and at nine o'clock, separately, not 

at shift·changing time, they would conduct ihe trusties from the 

camp to the brickyard~the.ofice employees and those in positions 

of responsibility. The favorite train was at half-past one, 

the "Provider," after which we soon went to line-up and to lunch. 

My zek supervisor, Olga Petrovna Matronina, was brought 

to work along with the trusties, ~d sometimes, if her heart was 

anxious about the work, even earlier, by special.convoy. I sighed, 

came out of my hiding place, and went along the clay pit trolley 

track to the wet pressing factory-to report. 

The entire brickyard consisted of two plants-for wet. pressing 

and.dry pressing. Our clay pit worked.only for the wet-pfeSsing 

plant and the chief of the .wet pressing was Matronina. an 

engineer-specialist in silicates. What kind of flU engineer she was 

. I do. not know, but she .was fussy and stubborn. She was one of 

those unshakable loyalists-an orthodox Communist--of whOm 

I had already encountered a fe~ in the cells (there were not many 

of them in general), on whose mountain peak, howev~r, I myself 

could not cling. On the basis of the "letter" section, ChS, as a 

member of the family of one shot, she had received eight years 

from an OSO, and right now she was serving out her last months. 

True, they had not released any politicals throughout the war, 

and she, too, would be held until the notorious Special Decree. 

But even that did not cast any shadow on her state. of mind; she 

served the Party, and it was unimportant whether in freedom 

or in camp. She was from a reserve for r~ animals. In camp she 

tied a red scarf around her head and only a red scarf, even

"They've Brought the Fascists'" I 181 

though she was already over forty. (Not one camp girl wore a 

scarf like that in the brickyard, and not one free Komsomol girl 

either.) She bore no grudge for her husband's execution, nor for 

her own eight years of imprisonment; All these injustices had 

been caused, in her opinion, by individual Yagoda or Yezhov 

henchmen, and under Comrade Beria the only arrests 'being made 

were just. Seeing me in the uniform of a Soviet officer, she said 

at our first meeting: "Those who arrested me can now see the 

proofs of my orthodoxy." Not long before she had written a 

letter to Kalinin, and she quoted from it to all who wished or 

were forced to listen: "My long sentence has not broken my 

will in the struggle for the Soviet government, for Soviet industry." 

. 

Me-anwhile when Akimov had come and reported to her that 

the thieves refused to obey him, she herself did not go to explain 

to this socially friendly- element that their conduct was harming 

industry, but she pulled him up short: "You have to compel 

them! That's why you were appointed!" Akimov was beaten up, 

and she made no effort to struggle further, but merely wrote the 

camp: "Don't send us that contingent any more." She also accepted 

very calmly the fact that in her factory young girls 

worked eight hours, straight at automatic m~chines; they were 

confined uninterruptedly for the whole eight-hour period to 

monotonous motions at the conveyor belt. She said: "There is 

nothing to be done; there are more important sectors than that 

for mechanization." The day before, Saturday, there had. been 

a rumor going the rounds that they would again not give us our 

Sunday off (and that's exactly what happened). The young girls 

at the automatic machines clustered around her and said to her 

bitterly: "Olga Petrovna! Are they really going to take our Sunday 

away from us again? After all, this is the third in a row! The 

war's over!" Wearing her red scarf, sh)' indignantly tossed her 

dry, dark profile, which wasn't a woman's, nor a man's either: 

"Girls! What right have we to a Sunday? The construction project 

in Moscow is being held up because there are no bricks!" (In . 

other words, of course, she didn't know anything about any particular 

construction project to which our bricks were being sent, 

but in her mind's eye she could see that big generalized construction 

project, and here were these young girls, so vile as to want to 

wash their things.) 

I was necessary to Matronina in order to double the number of 


cars of clay in one shift. She took no account of the strength 

of the sloggers, the condition of the cars, or the capacity of the 

pressing plant, but merely demanded that it be doubled!' (And 

how could aD outsider unacquainted with the setup double the 

number of carloads except with his fist?) I did not double the 

output, anet by and large the output did no! change by one 

carload under me--and Matronina, merciless, scolded me in 

Barinov's presence and that of the workers, without being able 

to get through her woman's head that which the least sergeant 

knows: that one must not dress down even a corporal in the 

presence of a private. And then on one occasion, admitting my 

~tot defeat in the clay pit, and therefore my incapacity to direct, 

Iwent to Matronina and; as gently as I could, asked her: 

"Olga Petrovna! I am a good mathematician; I do figures 

quickly. I have heard that you need an accountant in the plant. 

Take me!". 

"An accountant?" she raged, and her cruel face- grew even 

darker, and the ends of her red scarf wound about the back of 

her h~ad. "rn put any wisp of a girl to work as an accountant, 

but what we need are commanders of production. How many 

loads are you short for your shift? Be off with you!" And, like 

a new Pallas Athena, with outstretched arm she sent me back to 

the clay pit. .. 

And a day later the position of foreman of the clay pit was 

abolished, and I was fired, not just straightforwardly b~t vengefully. 

Matronina sl,llDJDoned Barinov and gave him his orders: 

"Put him to work with a crowbar and don't take your eyes 

off him! Make him load six cars a shift! Make him sweat!" 

And right then, in my officer's uniform in which I took so much 

pride, I went forth to dig clay. Barinov was overjoyed. He had 

foreseen my fall. 

If I had better understood the secret, alert connection between 

all camp events, I could have guessed at my fate the day before. 

In the Novy Iyerusalim mess hall tb,.ere was a separate ~erving 

,window for the ITR's-the'Engineering and Technical Workers 

-from which the engineers, bookkeepers, and . . . shoemakers 

received their meals. After my appointment as foreman of the 

clay pit, catching on to the camp grasp of things, I had approached 

this window and demanded my meal. The cooks 

dragged their feet about it, saying that I wasn't on the list of 

'

"They've. Brought the Fascists!" I 183 

!TR's, but nonetheless. they did each time issue me my meal, and 

even without protesting after it while, so that I myself came to 

believe that I was on their list. As I thought it over later-I was, 

for the kitchen, still a question mark: hardly had. I arrived than 

I acted big;! had borne myself proudly and gone about in military 

uniform. Such a person might very easily in a week become a 

senior work assigner or the senior camp bookkeeper or a doctor. 

(In camp everything is possible!!) And then they would be in 

my hands. So even though in actual fact the plant waS only trying 

me out and had not included me on any list at all-the kitchen 

kept on feeding mejust in case~ But one day before my fall, when 

even the plant didn't know, the camp kitchen already knew all 

about it, and slammed the door in my mug: I had turned out to 

be a cheap sucker. This tiny episode typifies the atmosphere of 

the camp world.· 

This so prevalent human desire to be set apart by clothes discloses 

us in fact, particularly to the· keen eyes of camp. It seems 

to us that w.e~l'e clothing ourselves, but in fact we're' baring ourselves, 

we,..-showing what we're worth. I did not understand that 

my military uniform had the same price as Matronina'sred scarf. 

But there was an unslumbering eye which had spied it all out 

from a hiding place. And one day an orderly was sent to get me. 

A lieutenant wanted to see me--over here, in a separate room. 

The young lieutenant conversed with me very pleasantly. In 

the cozy, clean room he and I were alone. The sun was shining 

just before sinking in the west and the wind was blowing the cur- . 

tain. He told me to be seated. For some reason he asked me to 

write my autobiography-and he could not have made a more 

pleasant proposal. After the protocols of interrogation in which 

I had only spat on myself, after. tire humiliation of the Black 

Marias and the transit prisons, after the convoy and the prison 

jailers, after the thieves and the trusties, who had refused to see 

in me a former captain of our glorious Red Army, here I sat 

behind a desk and without being pUShed by anyone at all, and 

beneath the benign glance of a friendly lieutenant, I wrote at 

just the right lengt~ in thick ink on excellent smooth paper which 

did not exist in camp that I had been a captain, that I had commanded 

a battery, that I had' been. awarded some decomtiOnli. 

And thanks to the actual writing, it seemed thilt I had regained' 

my own personality, my own "I/'-(Yes, my gnoseological sub- 

184 I THE GULAG AllC.HIPELAGO 

ject, "r'! And yet I was, after all, a university man, a civilian, in 

the army by c~ance. Imagine how embedded it must be in a career 

officer-this insistence on being held in esteem!) And the lieutenant, 

on reading·my autobiography, was quite satisfied with it. 

"So you are a Soviet person, right?" Well, to be sure, well, of 

course, why not? How pleasant it was to rise again from the mud 

and ashes, and once again become a Soviet person! It was onehalf 

of freedom. 

The lieutenant asked me to come see him in five days. During 

these five days, however, I was forced to say good-bye to my 

miUtary uniform because it was bad to be digging clay in it. I hid 

my field shirt and my military britches in my suitcase, and at the 

camp storage room I received some patched and faded rag which 

appeared to have been washed after lying for a year in . a trash 

bin. This was an important step, thougI!. I did not as yet recognize 

. its significance: my soul had not yet become that of a zek, but 

my skin therewith became a zek's. With shaven head, tormented 

by hung~r, and squeezed by enemies, I would soon acquire the 

glance of a zek too-insincere, suspicious, all-observant. 

This was how I looked when in five days' time I went to see 

the security chief, still not understanding what he was getting at. 

But the security chief was not there. He had stopped coming there 

entirely. (He already knew, but we did not, that in another week 

we would all be dispersed and that they would be bringing Germans 

toNovy Iyerusalim to replace us.) And that is how I missed 

seeing the lieutenant. _ 

I discussed with Gammerov and IJ;l.gal why it was that I wrote 

my autobiography, and we did not guess, innocents, that these 

were already the first claws of the beast of prey reaching into our 

nest. And yet meanwhile the picture was so clear: Three young - 

men -had arrived in the new prisoner transport, and they kept 

4iscussing something· all the .time, arguing among themselves, 

and one of them-swarthy, round, and gloomy, with little mustaches, 

the one who had gotten himself a place in the bookkeeping 

office---didn't sleep nights and kept writing something on the 

bunks, writing and hiding it. Of course, one could send someone 

and grab what he was hiding-but without causing an alarm it 

was simpler to find out about it all from the one of them who wore 

army britches. He, evidently, was an army man and a Soviet 

person, and he would assist iIi. the spiritual surveillance.

"They've Brought the Fascists!" 

I 18S 

Zhora Ingal, who was not exhausted by his work during the 

day, really did refuse to sleep the first half-nights-and thus 

defended. the freedom of the creative spirit. He sat up on the 

upper panel of the multiple bunk, without mattress,. pillow, or 

blanket: in his padded jacket (it was not warm in the rooms, for 

the nights were autumn nights), in his shoes, h~ feet stretched 

out on the panel, his back leaning against the wall, and sucking 

on his pencil, looked sternly at his sheet of paper. (One could 

not have dreamed up worse behavior for camp! But neither he 

not we understood yet how all that stood out like a sore thumb 

and how they kept watch over such things.) 

Sometimes he simply gave in to his frailties and wrote an 

ordinary letter. His twenty-three-year-old wife had not even worn 

out the shoes in which she'd gone with him that winter to the 

conservatory-and now she had left him: security questionnaires, 

a blot on one's record, yes, and a person wants to live; He wrote 

to ano~er woman, whom he called a dear sister, concealing from 

himself and from her that he also loved her or W8!l ready to love 

her (but that woman, too, soon got married). He could write 

like this: 

"My dear little sister! Harken to the wonderful intimations of 

humanity: Handel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy! 1, too, .wanted to l:>ecome 

an intimation, but the clock of my life has come to a 

stop .... " 

Or simply: "You have become much closer to me during the - 

course of these months. It has become clear that there are very 

many real, genuiiie people in the world, and I v.ery much hope 

that your husband will also be a real human being." 

Or like this: 

"I have wandered through life; stumbling and in search of 

myself .... There is a bright light in the room, and I have never 

seen darkness that is blacker. But only here have I found myself 

and my own fate, and this time not in books either. And do you 

know, my little bird, I have never been such an optimist as I am 

right now. Now I know once and for all that there is nothing 

more precious in life than the idea one serves. And I also now 

know how and what I must write--that's the main thing."a 

3. No, he did not yet know how to write. Accor4lng to the account of Arkady 

BeUnkov, later on in another camp Ingal kept on writing like that, 

keeping to himself on the bunks. The prisoners first asked, and tl1en subae- 

186 THE GULA.G ARCHIPELAGO 

And for the time being, he wrote at night and hid during the 

day a story about EI Campesino-theSpanish Republican with 

whom he had shared a cell and whose peasant common sense had 

delighted him. EI Campesino's fate was a simple one: after having 

lost the war to Franco he came to the Soviet Union, and·after a 

while he was imprisoned here! - 

Ingal was not. a warm person. He did not inspire one to open 

one's heart ~o him. at the first impulse. (l have just written this 

and stopped to think: Was I called a warm person either?) But 

his st~adfastnes was a worthy model. To write in campI I might 

someday be able to rise. to it -if I didn't perish. But for the time 

being I was tormented by my own restless search, depressed-by 

. my first days as a clay digger. On a serene September evening 

Boris Gammerov and I cowd find time only to sit awhile on ~ 

pile of cinders at.the approach to the camp perimeter. 

'. In the direction of Moscow thirty-seven miles away the. heavens 

flamed with salutes--this was the "holiday of victory over Japan." 

But the lanterns of our camp compound burned with a dull tired 

light. A hostile reddish light emanated from the plant windows. 

And in a long and drawn-out string, as mysterious as the years. 

and the months of our prison terms,. the lanterns on the poles of 

the bm.ad brickyard compound receded into the distance. 

Aans .. 1I.ff1D!Dd . his knees, thin and coughing,- Gammerov re-· 

peJted: 

Nor desire it. 

.. For thirty years I· have nurtured 

My love for my native land, 

And I shall neither expect 

.. : your leniency ... * 

quently began to demand, that he show them what he was writing (denunciations, 

perhaps?). But regarding this only as one more act of violence against 

creative art-although from the opposite IIirection-he refused! And they ... 

beat him up unmercifully. 

·1 have quoted here these lines from his letters so that his grave may be 

marked with this tiny monument at least. 

4. Ingal could never complete this short story about EI Campesino because 

he never knew EI Campesino's fate. EI Campesino outlived his describer. I 

have heard that at the time of the great Ashkhabad earthquake he led a group 

of zeks out of a wrecked camp and shepherded them through the mountains 

into Iran. (Even the border guards had panicked.)


• 

''They've brought the Fascists! They've brought the Fascists!" was 

. a-cry heard not only in Novy Iyerusalim. In the late summer and 

autuDlll of 1945, that's how it was on all-the islands of theArchi- . 

pelaga'. Our arrival-that of the F ascists-opened up the road to 

freedom for the nonpolitical offenders. They had learned of their 

amnesty back on July 7; sipce that time they had been photographed, 

and their release documents had been readied, and their 

accounts in the bookkeeping offices. But first -for one month, 

then in places for two, and in some p~aces for three months, 

the amnestied zeks had been languishing within the nauseating 

barbed-Wire boundaries. There was 1).0 one to replace theml - 

There was no one to replace them! 

And we, newborn blind innocents that we were; in oUr 

calked-up cells, had continued to hope all spring and suri:uner for 

an amnesty! That Stalin would take pity on usi That _he would 

"take account of the Victory"! ... That, having passed us over 

in the first, the July, amnesty, he would subsequently deciare·a 

, second aninesty, a special ainnesty for political prisoners. ('they 

used to report even one detail: this amnesty was already prePared; 

it was lying on Stalin~8 desk, and all that was left was for him to 

sign it; but he was off on vacation. The incori~bles awaited a 

- genuine amnesty, the incorrigibles believed! ... ) .But if we had 

been -pardoned, then who wou!d have gone down into the mineS? 

. Who would have gone into the forests with saws? Who would 

have fired the bricks and laid them in walls? Stalin had managed 

to create a system under w~ch-if it. had manifested generosity 

or mercy-pestilence, famine, desolation, and ruin would have 

immediately embraced the entire cowitry. 

~v'yehT' brought the Fascists!" They had always hated us or 

at least disdained us, but now the nonpolitical offenders looked 

upon us almost with love because '?{e had come to take their 

places. And those same prisoners w.ho had learned, in German 

captivity, that there is no nation more despised, more abandoned, 

more alien and unneeded than the Russian, now learned, leaping 

down from red cattle cars and trucks onto the Russian earth, that 

even among this outcast people they were the most benighted 

and grievous of all. 

188 THE GULAG A&C81l'ELAGO 

Now that is what that great Stalinist amnesty turned out to be, 

one such as "the world had never seen.".Where, indeed, had the 

world ever seen an amnesty which did not concern poJiticals?!?5 

All those who had burglarized apartments, stolen the clothes 

off passers-by, raped girls, corrupted minors, given consumers 

short weight, played the hoodlum, disfigured the defenseless, been 

wantonly destructive in forests and waterways, committed bigamy, 

practiced blackmail or extortion, taken bribes, swindled, slandered, 

written false denunciations (but· those particular people 

didn't actually even serve time at all-that's for the future!), 

peddled narcotics, pimped or forced women into prostitution, 

whose carelessness or ignorance had resulted in the loss of life, 

all went scot-free. (And I have merely listed here the articles of 

the Code covered by the amnesty; this is not a mere flourish of 

eloquence. ) 

And then they want morality from the people! 

Half their terms were elimiriated for: embezzlers, forgers of 

documents and ration cards, speculators, and thieves of state 

property. (Stalin still was touchy about the pockets of the state.) 

-But there was nothing so repugnant to the fo~er . front-line 

soldiers and POW's as the universal blanket pardon of deserters 

in wartime. Every man who, out of cowardice, ran away from his 

unit, left the front, did not show up at the conscription point, hid 

for many years. in .a pit in the vegetable garden of his mother's 

home, in cellars, behind the stove (always at the mother's! deserters, 

as a rule, did not trust their wives!), who for years had 

nQt pronounced one word aloud~ who had turned into hunched-up 

hairy beasts-all of them, as long as they ·had been caught or had 

5. It freed 58'~ who had sentences of up to three years, a sentence almost 

never given anyone, probably not as many as one-half of one percent of those 

to whom if applied. But even among that one-half percent of the cases, the 

implacable spirit of the amnesty proved stronger than its conciliatory wording. 

I knew one lad~his name, I believe, was Matyushin (be was an artist in the 

little camp at the Kaluga Gates)-who had been sentenced under 58-1b very 

early on, even before the end of 1941, for having been taken prisoner wben it 

had not yet been decided how this was to be 'treated, or what term to give. 

They gave Matyushin just three years---4lJl unbelievable happening! At the end 

of his term, he was of course not freed, but was told to await Ute Special Decree. 

But then came the iunnesty! Matyushin began to ask (there was nowhere 

he could demand) for release. For almost five months-until December, 1945 

-the frightened officials of the Classification and Records Sectioll turned him 

down. Finally be was released to go back home ·to Kursk Province. There was 

, a rumor (and it's quite impossible to believe in any other outcome!) that soon 

afterward he was raked in and given something up to a whole tenner. It was 

impermissible to allow him to' take advantage of the absent-mindedness of the 

first court!


turned themselves in by the day of the amnesty, were proclaimed 

now unsullied, unjudged, equal Soviet citizens! (And that is when 

the perspicacity of the old proverb was justified: Flight is not 

beautiful, but it is healthy!) 

And those who trembled not, who did not play the coward, 

who, Jor their Motherland, took th!l enemy's blow and then paid 

for it with captivity-there could be no forgiveness for theJp: 

that's how tile Supreme Commander in Chief saw it. 

Was it that something in the deserters struck a chord in Stalin? 

Did he remembc:r his own aversion to serving as a rank-and-file 

soldier, his own pitiful service as a recruit in the'winter of 1917? 

Or did he simply conclude that cowards represented no danger to 

his rullL and that only the bold were dangerous? After a1I, it might 

seem that it was not at all reasonable to amnesty deserters even 

from Stalin's point of view: he himself had show}l his people the 

surest and simplest way to save one's skin in any future war.8 

In another book I have told the story of Dr. Zubov and his 

wife: An old woman in their house hid a wandering deserter, 

who later on turned them in for it; for this the Zubovs, husband 

and wife, got sentences of a tenner each under Article 58. The 

court determined that their guilt lay not so much in hiding a 

deserter as in the absence of any self-serving motive for this concealment: 

he was not a reiative of theirs, which'meant that it 

amounted to anti-Soviet intent! Under the StaIinistamnesty the 

deserter himself was liberated, without having served even three. 

years, and he had already forgotten about that little episode of 

his life. But things went differently with the Zubovs! They each 

served out a full ten years in camp (four in special Ciunps), an4 

another four years, without any sentence, in exile. They were' 

released only because. exile iD. general was done away with, nor 

were their convictions annulled either when they were released, 

not even after sixteen ye~, nor even nineteen years, after the 

events, and because of them they could not return to their home 

near·Moscow, and were prevented from quietly living out their 

lives.? 

6. And very likely there was also an historical justice here: an old debt was 

paid to deserting from the front, without which our whole- bistory would have 

gone quite differently. 

7. In 1958 the Chief MUitary Prosecutor replied to them: Your goUt was· 

proven and there are no bases for reconsidering the case. Only in 1962, after 

twenty years, was their case under Section 58-10 (anti-80viet intent) and 58-11 

(an "organization" .of husband and wife) quashed. Under Article 193-17-7g 

(aiding a deserter) it was determined that their sentence was five years, and 


Now that's what the rancorous, ~engeful, unreasonable Law 

fears and what it does not fear! . 

After the amnesty, they began to smear and smear with the 

paintbrushes of the Cultural and Educational Sections, and the 

internal archways and walls of the camps were decorated with 

mocking slogans: "For the broadest amnesty we shall respond 

to ,our dear· Party and government with doubled productivity." 

The ones amnestied were the habitual criminals and nonpolitical 

offenders, and the ones to respond with doubled work pro 

- ductivity were the politicals .... When in history has our government 

shone with a sense of humor? 

With our "Fascist" arri:val, daily releases began immediately 

in Novy Iyerusalim. Just the day before, you had seen women in 

the camp compound, looking disgraceful, dressed in tatters, using 

profanity-and lot they had suddenly been transformed, gotten 

washed, smoothed down their hair, and put on dresses with polka 

dots and stripes which they'd got hold of heaven knows where, 

and; with jackets over their arms, they went modestly to the 

station. Seeing them on the train, would you ever guess that they 

knew how to swear like troopers? . 

And there, leaving the gates, were thieves and half-breeds 

(who imitate the real thieves). They didn't drop their impudent 

bearing even there; they clowned and minced and waved to those 

left behind and shouted, and their friends shouted back to them 

from the windows. The guards didn't interfere-the thieves are 

permitted everything. One thief, not without imagination, stood 

his suitcase on end, clinibed up' on top of it lightly, and, cocking 

his cap and tossing back the flaps of his jacket, copped off at a 

transit prison somewhere or won at cards, played a farewell serenade 

to the camp on his mandolin, singing some sort of Qlieves' 

twaddle. Horse laughs. 

Those released still had a long walk on the path circling the 

camp and on through the field, and the folds of the barbed wire 

did not shut off from us the open view. That night those'thieves 

would be strolling on the boulevards of Moscow, and perhaps even 

in their first week they would make their jump (c'ean out an apart- 

/ 

(! after twenty years!) the Stalinist amnesty was applied. And that's precisely 

the way in which the two old people whose lives bad been smashed were notified 

in 1962: "As of July 7, 1945, you are cOf}Sidered released and your conviction 

annulled"!

"They've Broughi the Fascists!" I 191 

ment), they'd take the clothes off your wife, or sister, or daughter 

on the_night streets. 

And as for you Fascists (and Matronina was also a Fascist!): 

Double your work productivity I 

• 

Because of the amnesty there was ~ shortage of manpower everywhere, 

and there were rearrangements. For a short time I was 

switched from the clay pit to a plant section._ There I could take 

a look at Matronina's meChanization. Everyone had it bad here, 

but the most surprising of all was- the work of one young girl-; 

a real, genuine heroine of labor, though not suitable for the newspaper. 

Her place, her duty, in the shop had no name, but one 

could have called it the ''upper distributor." Next to the conveyor 

- belt emerging from _the press with cut, wet bricks (just ~ 

from clay and very heavy) stood two girls, one of them the "lower 

distributor," and the other the "server-up." These did not have 

to bend down, but simply pivot, and not in a wide-angle turn 

either. But the "upper distributor," who stood on- a pedestal like 

the queen of the shop, had incessantly to bend down, pick up a 

wet brick placed at her" feet by the "server-up," and without 

crushing it raise it to the level of her waist or even shoulders, and, 

without changing the position of her feet, turn from the waist at 

a ninety-degree angie (sometimes" to the right and sometimes to 

the left, depending on which receiving car was being loaded), 

and distribute the_bricks on five wooden shelves, twelve on each. 

Her motion had no intermission, did not stop or chilnge, and she 

moved at the speed of fast gymnastics-for the whole eight-hour 

shift, unless tlie press itself broke down. They kept handing and 

handing her half of all the bricks produced by the plant during a 

shift. Down below the girls switched duties, but she had no replacement 

for the entire eight hours. She ought to have grown 

dizzy from five minutes of such work, from those swings of her 

head and the bending and twisting of her torso. During the first" 

half of her shift, however, the girl still kept her smile (she-couldn't 

carry on a conversation because of the din of the press'), and 

. perhaps she liked being pu~ up there on a ped~ like a beauty 

queen, where everyone could see her strong, bare"legs below her 

hitched-Up skirt and the ballet-like elasticity of her waist. 

192 I THB GULAG AlCHIPBL~GO 

And for this work she got the highest" ration in the camp: ~n 

and a half extra ounces of bread (a total for the day of thirty 

ounces)-and for her dinner, besides the common black cabbage 

soup, three Stakhanovite portions-three pitiful portions of thin 

semolina cereal made with water. They gave her so little that she 

inhaled the full contents of the pottery bowl in one swallow. 

"We work for money and you work for bread, no secret there," 

a grubby free mechanic who had come to fix the press said to me. 

One-armed Punin fr,?m the Altai and I rolled away the loaded 

cars. These cars were like high towers-unsteady, because, thanks 

to ten shelves with tWelve bricks each, their center of gravity was 

high up. Wobbling and tottering, like a bookcase overloaded with 

books, such a car had to be pulled bY-JlD iron handle along straight 

rails; then led up onto a supporting truck, halted there, and then 

this truck had to be pulled along another straight line past the 

drying chambers. Brought to a ,stop at the one required, the car 

then had to be taken off the truck and pushed ahead of one in still 

another direction into the drying chamber. Each chamber was ,a 

long, narrow corridor along whose walls stretched ten slots and 

ten shelf supports. One had to push' the 'car right to the back, 

without letting it get out of line, and there I,"elease, the lever, setting 

all ten shelves with the bricks o!l the ten supports, and release 

ten pairs of iron grips, and immediately roll the empty car back 

out. This whole ,scheme, it seems, was German, out of the nineteenth 

century (and the car had a German name), but the German 

scheme provided not only for rails to support the car but 

also for a floor laid beneath the pits to support, the trucker. But 

for us the floor planks were rotten, broken, and I used to stumble 

and fall through. In addition, there was probably supposed to be 

ventilation in all the chambers, but there wasn't any, and whlle 

I struggled away at my mistakes in stacking (I often got things 

crooked, shelves got stuck, refused to set, and wet bricks tumbled 

down on my head), I gulped in carbon fumes and they burned my 

windpipe. 

Therefore I was not very sorry to leave the plant when I was 

again driven put to the clay pit. There were not enough clay diggers-they 

were being released too. They sent Boris Gammerov 

to the clay pit too, and so we began to work together. The work 

norm there was well known: during one shift one worker was to 

dig. load up. and deliver to the windlass six cars, full of clay- 

I


eight cubic yards. For two persons the norm was sixteen. In dry 

weather the two of us together could manage six and a half. But 

an autumn drizzle began. For one day, two, three, without wind, 

it kept on, getting neither heavier nor stopping. It was not torrential, 

so no one was going to take the responsibility for halting 

the outdoor work. "It never rains on the canal" was a famous 

Gulag slogan. But in Novy Iye~, for some reason, they did 

not even give us padded jackets, and there in the red clay pit 

beneath that monotonous drizzle we wallowed and smeared up· 

our old front-line overcoats, .which by the end of the third-day 

had already absorbed a pail of water each. The camp also gave 

us no footwear, and we were rotting our last front-line boots in 

the wet clay. . 

The first day we still joked. . 

"And don't you find, Boris, that Baron Tuzenbakh would have 

envied us a good deal right now? After all, he dreamed of working 

in a brickyard. Do you remember? To work so hard that· 

when he came home he would throw himself on his bed and 

instantly fall asleep. He evidently supposed that there would be 

a drier for wet clothes, that .there-would be a cot and a hot meal 

. consisting of two courses." . 

But we rolled away a pair of cars, and angrily knocking our 

spades against the iron sides of the next car (the clay stuck to 

the shovels), this time I spoke with irritation: 

"Just tell me, if you please, what devil made the sisters restless 

just sitting at home? No one forced them to go out on Sundays 

with young people to collect scrap; On Mondays no one required 

of them a precis of the Holy Scriptures. No one forced them to 

teach for nothing. No one drove them out into the blocks to put 

into effect universal education." 

And after one more load: 

''What empty, empty chatter they all indulged in: To work! 

To work! To work! Well, go ahead and work, the hell with you; 

who's stopping you? What a happy life it will be! So happy! So 

happy!! And what will it be like? You should have been accompanied 

by police dogs into that happy life. You'd have learned!" 

Boris was weaker than I; he could hardly wield his spade, 

which the sticky clay made heavier and heavier, and he could. 

hardly throw each shovelful up to the edge of the truck. Ncil!etheless, 

on the second day he tried to keep us up· to the heights of 


Vladimir Solovyev. He had outdistanced me there too! How much. 

of Solovyev he had already read! And I had not read even one 

line because of my Bessel functions. 

He told me whatever he remembered, and I kept trying to 

remember it, but I really couldn't; I didn't have the head for it 

at that moment. . 

Na, how can one preserve one's life and at the same time arrive 

at the truth? And why is it necessary to be dropped into the depths 

of camp in order to understand one's own squalor? 

He said: "Vladimir Solovyev taught that one must greet death 

with gladness. Worse than here ... it won't be." 

Quite true. 

We loaded as much as we coUId. Penalty ration? So it would 

be a penalty ration! The hell with you! We wrote off the day and 

wound our way to camp. But there was nothing joyful awaiting 

us there: three times a day that same black; unsalted infusion of 

nettle leaves, and once a day a ladle of thin gruel, a third of a 

liter. And the bread had already been sliced-they gave fifteen 

and a quarter ounces in the morning, and not a crumb more during 

the day or in the evening. And~en we were lined up for roll 

callout in the rain. And once again we slept on bare bunks in 

wet clothes, muddied with clay, and we shivered because they 

weren't heating the barracks. 

And the next day that fine drizzle kept falling and falling. 

The clay pit had got drenched, and we were stuck in it but good. 

No matter how much clay you took on your spade, and no matter 

how much you banged it on the side of the truck, the clay would 

not drop off. And each time we had to reach over and push the 

clay off the spade into the car. And then we realized that we had 

been merely doing extra work. We put aside the spades and began 

simply to gather up the squelching clay from under our feet and 

toss it into the car. 

. Borya was coughing. There was still a fragment of German 

timk shell in his lungs. He was thin and yellow, and his nose, ears, 

and the bones of his face had grown deathly pointed. I looked at 

him closely, and I was not sure: would he make it through a winter 

in camp? 

We still tried to divert our minds and conquer our situationwith 

thought. But by then neither philosophy nor literatlire was 

there. Even our hands became heavy, like spades, and hung down.

"They've Brought the Fascists!" I· 195 

Boris suggested: "No, to talk ... takes much strength. Let's 

be silent and think: to some purpose. For example, compose verses. 

In our heads." 

I shuddered. He could write verses here and now? The canopy 

of death hung over him; but the canopy of such a stubborn talent 

hung over his yellow forehead toO. 8 

And so we kept silent and scooped up the clay with our hands. 

The rain kept coming. Yet they not only didn't take us out of the 

clay pit, but Matronina, brandishing the fiery sword of her gaze 

(her "red" head was covered with a dark shawl), pointed out to 

the brigadier from the edge the different ends of the clay pit. And 

we understood: they were not going to pull out the brigade at the 

end of its shift at 2 P.M., but would keep it in the clay pit until 

it fulfilled its norm. Only then would we get both lunch and 

dinner. --- 

In Moscow the construction project was halted for lack of 

bricks. 

But Matronina departed and the rain thickened. Light red 

puddles formed everywhere in the clay and in our car too. The 

tops of our boots turned red, and out coats were covered with 

red spots. Our hands had grown numb from the cQld clay, and by 

this time. they couldn't even throw anything into the car. And 

. then we left this futile occupation, climbed up higher to the grass, 

sat down there, bent our heads, and pulled the collars of our coats 

up over the backs of our necks. 

From the side we looked like two reddish stones in the field. 

Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne 

or at Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of 

relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student 

cafes: They were already being published and were exhibiting 

their paintings. They were twisting and turning to find ways of 

distorting the insufficiently original world around them in some 

new way. They railed against the classics for exhausting all the 

subjects and themes. They railed at their own governments and 

their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and 

8. That winter Boris Gammerov died in a hospital from exhaustion and tuberculosis. 

I revere in him a poet who was never even allowed to peepc His 

spiritual image was lofty, and his verses themselves seemed to me very powerful 

at the time.· But I did not memorize even one ·of them, and I can find 

them nowhere now, so as to be able at least to make him a gravestone from 

those little stones. 

196 THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union. Theyrecorded 

interviews through the microphones of radio. reporters, 

listening all the time to their own voices and coquettishly elucidating 

what they wished to say in their last or their first book. They 

judged everything in the world with self~asurance, but particularly 

the prosperity and higher justice of our country. Only at 

some point in their old age, in the cours~ of compiling encyclopedias, 

would they notice with astonishment that they could not 

find any worthy Russian names for our letters-for all the letters 

of our alphabet. 

The rain drummed on the back of our heads, and" the chill 

crept up our wet backs. _ " 

We looked about us. The half-loaded cars had been overturned. 

Everyone had left. There was no one in the entire clay pit, nor in 

the entire field beyond the compound. Out in the gray curtain of 

rain lay the hidden village, and even the roosters had hidden in 

a dry place. 

We, too, picked up our spades, so that no one would steal them 

-they were registered in our names. And dragging th~m behind 

us like heavy wheelbarrows, we went around Matronina's plant 

beneath the shed where empty galleries wound all around the 

Hoffmann kilns that fired the bricks. There were drafts here and 

it was cold, but it was also dry .. We pushed ourselves down into 

the dust beneath the brick .archway and sat there. 

Not far away from us a big heap of coal was piled. Two zeks 

were digging into it, eagerly seeking something there. When they 

found it, they tried it in their teeth, then put it in- their sack. Then 

they sat themselves down and each ate a similar black-gray lump. 

"What are you eating there, fellows?" 

"It's 'sea clay.' The doctor doesn't forbid it. It doesn't do any 

good, but it doesn't Eto ariy harm either. And if you add a kilo of 

it a day to your rations, it's as if you had really eaten. "Go on, look 

for some; there's a lot o~.it among the coal." 

And so it was that right up to nightfall "the clay pit did not 

fulfill its work norm. Matronina gave orders that we should be 

left out all night. But ..• the electricity went out everywhere, and 

the work compound had no lights, so they called everyone in to 

the gatehouse. They ordered us to link arms, and with a beefed-Up 

convoy. to the barking of the dogs and to curses, they took us to


the camp compound. Everything was black. We moved along 

without seeing where it was wet and where the earth was firm, 

kneading it all up in succession; losing our footing and jerking 

one another. 

And in the camp compound it was dark. Only a hellish glow 

came from beneath the burners for "individual cooking." And in 

the mess hall two kerosene lamps burned next to the serving 

window. And you could not read the slogan, nor see the double 

portion of nettle gruel in the bowl, and you sucked it down with 

your lips by feel. 

And tomorrow would- be the same and every day: six cars of. 

red clay-three scoops of black gruel. In prison, too, we seemed 

to have grown weak, but here it went much faster. There was 

already a ringing in the head. That pleasant weakness, in which 

it is easier to give in than to fight back, kept coming closer. 

And in the barracks-total darkness. We lay there dressed in 

everything wet on everything bare, and it seemed it was warmer 

not to take anything off-like a poultice. - - 

Open eyes looked at the black ceiling, at the black heavens. 

Good Lord! Good Lord! Beneath the shells and the bombs I 

begged you to preserve my life. And now I beg you, please ~end 

me death. 

Chapter 7 

• 

The Way. of Life 

and Customs of the. Natives 

To describe the native life in all its outward monotony would 

seem to be both very easy and very readily attainable. Yet it is 

very difficult at the same time. As with every different way of life, 

one has to describe the round of living from one morning until 

the next, from one winter to the next, from birth (arrival in one's 

first camp) until death (death). And simultaneously describe 

everything about all the many islands and islets that exist. 

No one is capable of encompassing all this, of course, and it 

would merely be a bore to read whole volumes. 

And the life of the natives consists of work, work, work; of 

starvation, cold, and cunning. This work, for those who are unable 

to.push others out of the way and set themselves up in.a soft spot, 

is tharse!fsame general work which raises socialism up out of the 

earth, and drives us down into the earth. 

One cannot enumerate nor cover all the different aspects of 

this work, nor wrap your tongue about them. To push a wheelbarrow. 

("Oh, the machine of the OSO, two handles and one 

wheel, so!") To carry hand. barrows. To unload bricks barehanded 

(the skin quickly wears off the fingers). To haul bricks 

on one's pwn body by "goat" (in a shoulder barrow). To break 

, up stone and coal in quarry and mine, to dig clay and sand. To 

hack out eight cubic yards of gold-bearing ore with a pick and 

haul them to the screening apparatus. Yes, and just to dig in the 

198

The Way of Life and Customs of the Natives I 199 

earth, just to "chew" up earth (flinty soil and in winter). To cut 

coal underground. And there are ores there too--Iead and copper .. 

Yes, and one qm also ... pulverize copper ore (a sweet taste in 

the mouth, and one waters at the nose). One can impregnate 

ties with creosote (and one's whole body at the same time too). 

One can carve out tunnels for railroads. And build roadbeds. One 

can dig peat in the bog, up to one's waist in the mud. One can 

smelt ores. One can cast metal. One can cut hay on hummocks in 

swampy meadows (sinking up to one's ankles in water). One 

can· be a stableman or a drayman (yes, and steal oats from the 

horse's bag for one's own pot,. but the horse is government-issue, 

the old grass-bag, and she'll last it out, most likely, but you can 

drop dead). Yes, and generally at the "selkhozy"-the Agricultural 

Camps--you can do every kind of peasant work (and there 

is no work better than that: you'll grab something from the ground 

for yourself). 

But the father of all is our Russian forest with its genuinely 

golden tree trunks (gold is mined from them). And the oldest of 

all the kinds of work in the Archipelago is logging. It summons 

everyone to itself and has room for everyone, and it is not even 

out of , bounds for cripples (they will send out a three-man gang 

of armless men to stamp down. the foot-and-a-half snow). Snow 

. comes up to your chest. You are a lumberjack. First you yourself 

stamp it down next to the tree trunk. .you cut down the tree. 

Then, hardly able to make your way thiough the snow, you cut 

off all the branches (and you have to feel them out in the snow 

and get to them with your ax). Still dragging your way through. 

the same .loose snow, you have to carry off all the branches and 

make piles of them and burn them. (They smoke. They don't 

burn.) And now you have to saw up the wood to size and stack 

it. And the work norm for you and your brother for the day is six 

and a half cubic yards each, or thirteen cubic yards for two men 

working together. (In Burepolom the norm was nine cubic yards, 

but the thick pieces also had to be split into blocks. )By then 

your arms would not be capable of lifting an ax nor your feet of 

movipg. ' 

During the war years (on war rations), the camp inmates called 

three weeks at logging "dry execution.") , 

You come to hate this forest, this beauty of the earth, whose 

praises have been sung in verse and prose. You come to walk 


beneath the arches of pine and birch with a shudder of revulsion! 

For decades in the future, you only have to shut your eyes to see 

those same fir and aspen trunks which you have hauled on your 

back to the freight car,_ sinking into the snow and falling down 

and hanging on to them- tight, afraid to let go lest you prove 

unable to lift them out of the snowy mash. 

Work at hard labor in Tsarist Russia w~ limited for decades 

by the Normative Statutes of 1869, which were actually issued 

for free persons. In assigning work, the physical strength of the 

worker and the degree to which he was accustomed to it were, 

taken into consideration. (Can one nowadays really believe this?) 

.The workday was set at seve'll hours (!) in winter and at twelve 

and a half hours in summer. At the ferocious Akatui hard-labor 

center (Yakubovich, in the 1890's)the work norms were easily 

fulfilled by everyone except him. The summer workday there 

amounted to eight hours, inCluding walking to and from work. 

And from October on it was seven hours, and in winter only six. 

(And this was even before any struggle for the universal eighthour 

workday!) As for DQstoyevsky's hard labor in Omsk, it is 

clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can 

establish. The work there was agreeable and went with a swing, 

and the prison administration- there ev~n dressed them up in white 

linen jackets and trousers! Now, how much further could they 

have gone? In our camps they used to say: "You could even put 

on a white collar"-which meant things were very, very easy and 

there was absolutely nothing to do. And they had ... even white 

jackets! After work the hard-labor convicts of the "House of the 

Dead" used to spend a long time st-rolling around the prison courtyard. 

That means that they were not totally fagged out! Indeed, 

the Tsarist censor did .not want to pass the manuscript of The 

House of the Dead fOf fear that the easiness of the life depictedby 

Dostoyevsky would fail to deter people from crime. And so 

Dostoyevsky added new pages for the censor which demonstrated 

that life in hard labor was nonetheless hard!l In our camps only, 

the trusties went strolling around on Sundays, yes, and even they 

-hesitated to. And Shalamov remarks with respect to the Notes 

orMariya Volkonskaya.that the Decembrist prisoners in Ner- 

I. Letter of I. A, Gruzdev to Gorky. Gorky Archives. Vol. XI. Moscow. 

1966. p_ 157. -


chinsk had. a norm of 118 pounds of ore to mine and load each 

day. -(One hundred and eighteen pounds! One could lift that all 

at once!) Whereas Shalamov on the Kolyma had a work norm 

per day of 28,800 pounds. And Shalamov writes that in addition 

their sUmmer workday was sometimes sixteen hours long! I don't 

know how it was with sixteen, but for many it was thirteen hours 

IQng-on earth-moving work in Karlag imd at the northern logging 

operations-and these were hours on the job itself, over and 

above the three miles' walk to the forest and three back. And 

anyway, w.by should we argue about the length of the day? After 

all, the work norm was senior in rank to the length of the workday, 

and when the brigade didn't fulfill the norm, the only thing that 

was changed at the end of the shift was the convoy, and the work 

sloggers were left in the woods by the light of searchlights until 

os~thgindim that they got back to the camp just.~efore morning 

in time to eat their dinner along with their breakfast and. go out 

into the woods again. 2 - 

. There is no one to tell about it either. They all died. 

And then here's anpther way they raised the norms and proved 

it was possible to fulfill them: In cold lower than 60 degrees below 

·zero, workdays were written off; in other words, on such days the 

records showed that the workers had not gone out to work; but 

they chased them out anyway, and whatever they squeezed out of 

them on those days was added 10 the other days, thereby raising 

the percentages. (And the servile Medical Section wrote off those 

who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis. ~d 

the ones who were left who could no longer walk and. were strain 

. ing every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to 

camp, the convoy simply shot, so that they wouldn't escape before 

they could come back to get them.) 

And how did they feed them.in return? They poured water into 

a pot, and the best one might expect was that they woul~ drop 

unscrubbed small potatoes into it, -but otherwise black cabbage, 

beet tops, all kinds of trash. Or else vetch or bran, they didn't 

2. Those who 1ncrease work norms in industry can still deceive themselves 

into thinking that such are the successes of the technology of production. But 

those who increase the norms of physical labor are executioners par excellencel 

They cannot seriously believe thst under socialism the human being is twice as 

big and twice aa muscular. They are the ones •.• who should be triedl1bey 

are the ones who should be sent out to fulfill those work norms! 


begrudge these. (And wherever there was a water shortage, as 

there was at the Samarka Camp 'near Karaganda, only one bowl 

of gruel was cooked a day, and they also gave out a ration of 

two cups of turbid salty water.) Everything any good was always 

and without fail stolen for the chiefs (see Chapter 9), for the 

trusties, and for the thieves-the cooks were all terrorized, and 

it was only by submissiveness that they kept their jobs. Certain 

amounts of fat, and meat "subproducts" (in other words, not real 

food) were signed out from the warehouses, as were fish, peas, 

and cereals. But not much of that ever found its way into the 

mouth of the pot. And in remote places the chiefs even took all 

the salt for themselves for their own pickling. (In 1940, on the 

Kotlas-Vorkuta Railroad, both the bread and the gruel were unsalted.) 

The worse the food, the more of it they gave the zeks. 

They used to give them horse meat from exhausted horses driven 

to death at work, and, even though it was quite impossible to 

chew it, it was a feast. Ivan Dobryak recalls today: "In my own 

time I have pushed no small amount of dolphin meat into my 

mouth, also walrus, seal, sea bear, and all kinds of other sea 

animal trash. [I interrupt: we ate whale meat in Moscow, at the 

Kaluga Gates.] I was not even afraid of animaI feces. And as for 

willow herbs, lichens, wild camomile".-they were the very best of 

dishes." (This means he himself went out and added to his rations.) 

, 

It was impossible to try to keep nourished on Gulag norms 

anyone who worked out in the bitter cold for thirteen or evel\ ten 

hoUrs. And it was completely impossible once the basic ration had 

been plundered. And this was where Frenkel's satanic mixing 

paddle was put into the boiling pot: some sloggers would be fed 

at the expense of others. The pots were divvied up; if less than 

30 percent of the norm (and in each different camp this was 

calculated in a different way) was fulfilled, the ration,issued you 

was a punishment block ration: 10V2 ounces of bread and a bowl 

of gruel a day; for from 30 to 80 percent of norm they issued a 

penalty ration of 14 ounces of bread a day and two bowls of 

gruel; for from 81 to 100 percent you got a work ration of from 

17Y.l to 21 ounces of bread and three bowls of gruel; and after 

that came the shock workers' pots, and they differed among themselves, 

running from 24Y.l to 31 Y.l ounces of bread a day and 

supplementary kasha portions-two portions-and the bonus


dish, which was some kind of dark, bitterish, rye-dough fingers 

stuffed with peas. 

' 

And for all this watery food which could not possibly cover 

what the body expended, the muscles burned up at bOdy-rending 

toil, the shock workers and Stakhanovites went into the ground 

sooner than did the malingerers. This was something the old 

camp veterans understood very well, and it was covered by their 

own saying: Better not to give me an extra kasha-and not to 

wake me up for work! If such a happy stroke of fortune befalls 

you ... as to be allowed to stay on your bunk for lack of clothing, 

you'll get the "guaranteed" twenty-one ounces. If they have 

dressed you up for the season (and this is a famous Gulag expression!) 

and taken you out to work on the canal-even if you 

wear your sledge hammer down to a chisel, you'll never get more 

than ten and a half ounces out of the frozen soil. 

But the zek was not at liberty to stay on his bunk. 

Of course, they did' not feed the zeks so badly everywhere and 

always, but these are typical figures for Kraslag in wartime. At 

Vorkuta in that same period the miner's ration was in aIllikelihood 

the highest in all of Gulag (because heroic Moscow was 

being heated with that coal): it was 45~ ounces for 80 percent 

of norm underground or 100 percent on the surface. And in that 

most horribly murderous Tsarist hard-labor Akatui on· a nonworking 

day (spent "on the bunk") they used to give out 2~ 

Russian pounds of bread (35 ounces) as well as 32 zolotniks (in 

other words, 4.65 ounces) of meat. And on a working day there 

they gave out 3 Russian pounds (43 ounces) of bread and 48 

zolotniks (7 ounces) of meat. Was that not maybe higher than 

the front-line ration in tIre Red Army? And the Akatui prisoners 

carted off their gruel and their kasha by the tubful to the jailers' 

pigs. And P. Yakubovich found their thin porridge made from 

buckwheat kasha (! Gulag never ever saw that!) "inexpressibly 

repulsive to the taste." Danger of death from malnutrition is 

something else that never hung over the hard-labor convicts of 

Dostoyevsky's book. And -what can you say if geese went wandering 

around (!!) in their prison yard ("in the camp compound") 

and the prisoners didn't w.ring their necks?3 The bread at Tsarist 

3. On the basis of the standards of many harsh camps Shalamov justly reproached 

me: "And what kind of a hospital ,cat was it that was walking 

around where you were? Why hadn't they killed it and eaten it long before? 


Akatui was set out on their tables unrestricted, and at Christmas 

they were given a pound of' beef and unlimited butter for their 

cereal. On Sakhalin the Tsarist prisoners working on roads and 

in mines during the months of the most work received each day 

56 ounces of bread, 14 ounces of meat; 8% ounces of cereal! 

And the conscientious Chekhov investigated whether these norms 

were really enough, or whether, in view of the inferior quality 

of the baking and cooking, they fell short. And if he had looked 

into the bowl of our Soviet slogger, he would have given up the 

ghost right then and there. 

What imagination at the beginning of our century could have 

pictured that "after thirty or forty years," not just on Sakhalin 

alone, but througliout the entire Archipelago, prisoners would be 

glad to get even more soggy, dirty, slack-baked bread, with admixtures 

of the devil only knew what-and that 24\12 ounces of 

it would be an enviable shock-worker ration? 

No,even more! That throughout all Russia th~ collective 

farmers would even envy that prisoners' ration! "We don't get 

even that, after all!" 

Even at the Tsar's Nerchinsk mines they gave a supplementary 

"gold prospectors' " payment for everything over the government 

• norm (which was always moderate). In our camps, for most of 

the years of the Archipelago, they either paid nothing for labor 

or just as much as was required for soap and tooth powder. Only 

in those rare camps and in those short periods when for some 

reason they introduced cost accounting (and only from one-eighth 

to one-fourth of the genuine wage was credited to the prisoner) 

could the zeks buy bread, meat, and sugar. And all of a suddenoh, 

astonishment!-a crust would be left on the mess hall table, 

and it might be there for all ot five minutes without anyone reaching 

out a hand to grab it. 

And how were our natives dressed and shod? 

All archipelagoes are like all archipelagoes: the blue ocean 

rolls about them, coconut palms grow on them, and the administration 

of the islands does not assume the expense of clothing the 

And why does Ivan Denisovich in' your story carry a spoon with him, even 

though it is well known that-everything cooked in camp can easily be drunk 

down as a liquid by tipping up the bowl?"


natives--they go about barefoot and almost naked .. But as for 

our cursed Archipelago, it would have been quite impossible to 

picture it beneath the hot sun; it was eternally covered with snow 

and the blizzards eternally raged over it. And in addition to everything 

else it was necessary to clothe and to shoe all that horde of 

ten to fifteen million prisoners. 4 

Fortunately, born outside the bounds of the Archipelago, the 

zeks arrived here not altogether naked. They wore what they 

came in-more accurately, what the socially friendly elements 

might .leave of it-except that.as a brand of the Archipelago, a 

piece had to be torn off, just as they clip one ear of the ram; 

greatcoats have their flaps cut off diagonally, Budenny helmets 

have the high peak cut off so as to leave a draft through the top. 

But alas; the clothing of free men is not eternal, and footgear 

can be in shreds in a week from the stumps and hummocks of the 

Archipelago. And therefore it is necessary to clothe the natives, 

even though they have nothing with which to pay for the clothing. 

Someday the Russian stage will yet see this sight! And the 

Russian cinema screen! The pea jackets one color and their 

sleeves another. Or so many patches on the pea jacket that its 

original cloth is totally invisible. Or a flaming pea jacket-with 

tatters on it· like tongues of flame. Or patches on britches made 

from the wrappings of someone's food parcel from home, and for 

a long while to come one can still read the address written in the 

corner with an indelible penciJ.5 

And on their feet the tried and true RuSsian "lapti"-bast 

sandals-except that they had no decent "onuchi"-footclothsto 

go with them. Or else they might have a piece of old automobile 

tire, tied right on the bare foot with a wire, an electric cord. (Grief 

has its own inventiveness .... ) Or else there. were "felt boots" 

"burki"-put together from pieces of old, .torn-up padded jackets, 

with soles made of a layer of thick felt and a layer of rubber.8 

In the· morning at the gatehouse, hearing complaints about the 

4. According to the estimates of the encyclopedia Rossiya-SSSR. there were 

up to fifteen million prisoners at ~ time. This figure agrees with the estimate 

made by prisoners inside the U.S.S.R., as we ourselves have added it up. Whenever 

they publish more proven figures, we will accept them. 

5. In Tsarist Akatui the prisoners were given fur overcoats. 

6. Neither Dostoyevsky. nor Chekhov. nor Yakubovich tells us what the 

prisoners of thei~ own Tsarist times wore on their feet. But of course they 

were doubtless shOd, otherwise they would have written about It. 


cold, the chief of the catJlpwould reply with his Gulag sense of 

:ro~h . 

"My goose out there goes around barefoot all winter long and 

doesn't complain, although it's true her feet are red. And all of 

you have got rubber overshoes." 

And then, in addition, bronze-gray camp faces will appear on 

the screen. Eyes oozing with tears, red eyelidS. White cracked 

lips, covered with sores. Skewbald, unshaven bristles on the faces. 

In winter ... a summer cap with earflaps sewn on. 

I recognize you! Ii: is you, the inhabitants of my Archipelago! 

But no matter how many hours there are in the working daysooner 

or later sloggers will return to _the barracks. 

Their barracks? Sometimes it is a dugout, dug into the ground. 

And in the North more often ... a tent-true, with earth banked 

and reinforced hit or miss with boards. Often there are kerosene 

lamps in place of electricity, but sometimes thex:e are the ancient 

Russian "splinter lamps" or else cotton-wool wicks. (In Ust-Vym 

,for two years they saw no kerosene, and even in headquarters 

barracks they got light from oil from the food store.) It is by this 

pitiful light tIlat we will survey this ruined world. 

Sleeping shelves in two stories, sleeping.shelves in three stories, 

or, as a sign of luxury, "vagonki"-multiple bunks-the boards 

most often bare and nothing at all on them; on some of the work 

parties they steal so thoroughly (and then sell the spoils through 

the free employees) that nothing government-issue is given out 

and no one keeps anything of his own in the barracks; they take 

both their mess tins and their mugs to work with them (and even 

tote the bags containing their belongings-and thus' laden they 

dig iIi the earth); those who have them put their blankets around 

their necks (a film scenel), or else lug their things to trusty 

. friends in a guarded barracks. During the day the barracks are as 

empty as if uninhabited. Atnight they might tum over their wet 

work clothes to be dried in the drier (if there is a drier!·)-but 

undressed like that you are going to freeze on the bare boards! 

And so they dry their clothes on themselves. At night their caps 

may freeze to the wall of the tent-or, in a woman's case, her 

hair. They even hide their bast sandals under their heads so they 

won't be stolen off their feet. (Burepolom during the war.) In 

the middle of the barracks there is-an· oil drum with holes in 

it which has been converted into a stov~, and it is good when it

The Way of Ufe and Customs of the Natives I 207 

gets red-hot-then the steamy odor of drying footcloths permeates 

the en~ barracks--but it sOD,letimes happens that the wet firewood 

in it doesn't bum. Some of the barracks are so infested with 

insects that even four days' fumigation with burning SUlphur 

doesn't help and when.in the summer the zeks go out to sleep on 

the ground in the camp compound the bedbugs crawl after them 

and find -them even there. And the zeks boil the lice off their 

, underwear in their mess tins after dining from them. 

All this became possible only in the twentieth century, and 

comparison here with the prison chroniclers of the past century is 

to no avail; they didn't write of anything like this. 

It is necessary to add to all this the picture of the way the 

brigade's bread is brought on a_ tray from the bread-cutting room 

into the mess hall under guard of the huskiest brigade members 

carrying staves--otherwise other prisoners will grab it, tear it 

apart, and run off with it. And the picture should also be added 

of the way food parcels from home are knocked out of the zeks' 

hands at the very moment they leave the parcel office. And also 

the constant alarm whether the camp administration is going to 

take away the rest day (lJIld why.talk about the war if for a whole 

year before the war they had not had one day off on the "Ukhta 

State Farm," and no one in Karlag could remember any rest days 

from 1937 right through 1945'1). Then on top of everything.one 

has to add, the eternal impermanence of camp life, the fear of 

change: runlors about a prisoner transport; the prisoner transport 

itself (the hard labor of Dostoyevsky's time knew no prisoner 

transports, and for ten or even twenty years people served out 

their term in one prison, and that was a totally different kind of 

life); then some sort of dark and sudden shufiling of "contingents"--either 

a transfer _"iii. the interests of production," or 

a "commissiontng" by a medical review board, or inventory of 

property, or sudden night searches that involve undressing and the 

tearing apart of all the prisoners' meager rags--and then beyond 

- that the thorough individual searches before the big holidays of 

May 1 and November 7 (the Christmas and Easter of hard labor 

in the past century knew nothing like this). And three times a 

. month ~ere were the fatal, ruinous baths. (To avoid repetition, 

I will. not write about them here; there is a detailed'story-investigation 

in Shalamov, and a story by Dombrovsky.) 

And later there was that constant, clinging (and, for an intellectuaI, 

torturing) lack of privacy, the condition of not being an 

208 I THE GULAG A.RCHIPELAGO 

individual but a member of a brigade instead, and the necessity of 

. acting for whole days and whole years not as you yourself have 

decided but as the brigade requires. 

And one must remember as well that everything that has been 

said refers to the established camp in operation for some time. 

But that camp had to be started at some time and by someone 

(and by whom if not by our unhappy brother zeks, of course?): 

they came to a cold, snowy woods, they stretched wire on the 

trees, and whoever managed to survive until the first barracks 

knew those barracks would be for the guard anyway. In November, 

1941, near the station of Reshoty, Camp No.1 of Kraslag 

was opened (over a ten-year period they increased to seventeen). 

They drove 250 soldiers there, removed from the army to 

strengthen it morally. They cut timber, they built log frames, but 

there was nothing to cover the roofs with, and so they lived with 

iron stoves beneath the sky. The bread brought them was frozen, 

and they chopped it up with an, ax, and gave it out in handfulsbroken 

up, crushed up, crumby. Their other food was heavily 

salted humpback salmon. It burned their mouths, and they eased 

the burning with snow. 

(When you remember the heroes of the War of the Fatherland, 

do not forget these!) 

Now that is the way of life of my Archipelago. 

'. 

Philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writerS could have 

observed in our camps, as nowhere else, in detail and on a large 

scale the special process of the narrowing of .the ititellectual and 

spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human 

being to an animal and the process of dying alive. But the 

psychologists who got into our camps were. for the most part not 

up to observing; they themselves had fallen into that very same 

stream that was dissolving the· personality into feces and ash. 

Just as nothing that contains life can exist without getting rid 

of its wastes, so the Archipelago could not keep swirling about 

without precipitating to the bottom its principal form of waste- 

the last-leggers. And everything built by the Archipelago had been 

squeezed out of the muscles of the last-leggers (before they became 

last-leggeI:s). And those who survived, who reproach the 

7. See Chapter 22.


lost-Ieggers with being themselves to blame, must takeupon 

themselves the disgrace of their own preserved lives. 

And among the surviving, the orthodox Communists now write 

.me lofty protests: How base are the thoughts and feelings of the 

heroes of youi' story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich! 

Where are their anguished cogitations about the course o~ history? 

Everything is about bread rations and gruel, and yet there 

are sufferings much more unbearable than hunger. 

. Oh--so there are! Oh--so there are indeed much more unbearable 

sufferings (the sufferings of orthQdox thought) '1 You 

in your medical sections and your storerooms, you never knew 

hunger there, orthodox loyalist gentlemen! 

It has been known for centuries that Hunge~ . . . rules the 

world! (And all your Progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built 

on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt 

against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being, 

unless he has himself consciously decided to die. Hunger, which 

forces an honest person to reach out and steal ("When the belly 

rumbles, conscience flees"). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish 

person to look with envy into someone else's bowl, and to 

try painfuIly to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor. is 

receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow 

it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything 

else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food, 

food, and food. Hunger, from which it is imp~sible to escape 

even in dreams-dre~ are about food, and insomnia is over 

food. And soon-just insomnia. Hunger, after which one cannot 

even eat up; the man has by then turned into a one-way pipe and 

everything emerges from him in exactly the same state in which it 

was swallowed. 

And this, too, the Russian cinema screen mus.t see: how the 

last-Ieggers, jealously watching their competitors out of the corners 

of their eyes, stand duty at the kitchen porch waiting for 

them to bring out the slops in the dishwater. How they throw·, 

themselves on it, and fight with one another; seeking a fish head, 

a bone, vegetable parings. And how one last-Iegger dies, killed 

in that scrimmage. And how immediately afterward they wash off 

this waste and boil it and eat ii:. (And inquisitive cameramen can 

continue with their shooting and show us how, in 1947 in 

Dolinka, Bessarabian peasant women who had been brought in 

from· freedom hurled themselves with that very same intent on 


slops which the last-leggers had already checked over.) The 

screen will show bags of bones which are still joined together 

lying under blankets at the hospital, dying almost without movement-and 

then being carried out. And 9n the whole . . . how 

simply a human being dies: he was speaking-and he fell silent; 

he was walking along the road-and he fell down. "Shudder and 

,it's over." How (in camp at Unzha and Nuksha) the fat!faced, 

socially friendly work assigner jerks a zek by the legs to get him 

out to line-up-and he turns out to be dead, and the corpse falls 

on its head on the floor. "Croaked, the scum!" And he gaily gives 

him a kick for good measure. (At those camps during the war 

there was no doctor's aide, not even an orderly, and as a result 

there were no -sick, and anyone who pretended to be sick was 

taken out to the woods in his comrades' arms, and they also took 

a board and rope along so they could drag the corpse back the 

more easily. At work they -laid the sick person down next to the 

bonfire, and it was to the interest of both the zeks and the convoy 

to have him die the sooner.) 

What the screen cannot catch will be described to us in slow, 

meticulous prose, which will distinguish between the nuances of 

the various paths to death. which are sometimes called scurvy, 

sometimes pellagra, sometimes alimentary dys~rophy. For instance, 

if there is blood on your bread after you have taken a bite 

-that is scurvy. From then on your teeth begin to fallout, your 

gums rot, ulcers appear on your legs, your flesh will begin to fall 

off in whole chunks, and you will begin to smell like a corpse. 

Your bloated legs collapse. They refuse to take such cases, into 

the hospital, and they crawl on all fours -around the camp compound. 

But if your face grows dark and your skin begins to peel 

and your entire organism is racked by diarrhea, this is pellagra. 

It is necessary to halt the diarrhea somehow-'-so they take three 

spoons of chalk a day, and they say that in this case if you can 

get and eat a lot of herring the food will begin to hold. But where 

-are you going to get herring? The man grows weaker, weaker, 

and the bigger he is, the faster it goes. He has already become so 

weak that he cannot climb to the top bunks, he cannot step across 

a log in his path; he has to lift his leg with his two hands or else 

crawl on all fours. The diarrhea takes out of a man both strength 

and all interest-in other people, in l,ife, in himself. He grows 

deaf and stupid, and he loses all capacity to weep, even when he_ 

is being dragged along the ground behind a sledge. He is no longer

The Way of Life and Customs of t~ Natives I 211 

afraid of death; he is wrapped in a submissive, rosy glow. He has 

crossed all boundaries and has forgotten the name of his wife, of· 

his children, and finally his own name too. Sometimes the entire 

body of a mali dying of starvation is covered· with blue-black 

pimples like peas, with pus-filled heads smaller than a pinheadhis 

face, arms, legs, his trqnk, even his scrotum. It is so painful 

he cannot be touched. The tiny boils come to a head and burst 

and a thick wormlike string of pus is forced out of them. The 

man is rotting alive. 

If black astonished head lice are crawling on the face of your 

neighbor .PO the bunks, it is a sure sign of death. 

Fie! What naturalism. Why keep talking about all that? 

And that is what they usually say today, those who did not 

themselves suffer, who were themselves the executioners, or who 

have washed their hands of it, or who put on an. innocent expression: 

Why remember all that? Why rake over old wounds? 

(Their wounds!!) . 

Lev TOlstoi had an answer for that-to Biryukov: "What do 

you mean,. why .remember? If I have had a terrible illness, and 

I -have succeeded in recovering from it and been cleansed of it, 

I will always remember gladly. The only time I will refuse to 

remember is when I am still ill and have got worse, and when I 

wish. to deceive myself. If we remember the old and look it 

straight in the face, then our new and present violence will also 

disclose itself."8 - 

I want to conclude these pages about last-Ieggers with 

N,K.G.'s story about the engineer Lev Nikolayevich Y. (! indeed, 

this must, in view of the first name and patronymic, be in honor 

of Tolstoi!)-a last-Iegger theoretician who found the last-Iegger's 

pattern of existence to be the most convenient method of 

preserving his life. 

• 

Here is how the engineer Y. ocup~ himself in a remote corner 

of"the camp compound on a hot Sunday: Something with a 

resemblance to a human being sits in a declivity above a pit in 

which brown peaty water has collected. Set out around the pit 

are sardine heads, fish bones, pieces of gristle, crusts of bread, 

lumps of cooked cereal, wet washed potato peelings, and something 

in addition which it is d!fficult even to name. A tiny bonfire 

has been built on a piece of.tin, and above it hangs a soot-black- 

8. Biryukov, Razgovory s Tolstym (Conversations with Tolstoi>, Vol. 3-4, 

p. 48. ' 

212 I THE GULAG ARCHIP.ELAGO 

ened soldier's mess tin containing a broth:; It seemS to be ready! 

The last-Iegger begins to dip out the dark slops from the mess tin . 

with a wooden spoon and to wash down with them one after 

an.other the potato peelings, the gristle, then the . sardine heads. 

He keeps chewing away very,-very slowly and deliberately (it's 

the common misfortune of last-Ieggers to gulp things down hastily 

without chewing). His nose can hardly be seen in the midst of 

the dark gray wool that covers his neck, his chin, his cheeks. His 

nose and his forehead are a waxy brown color and in places the 

skin is peeling. His eyes are teary ~d blink frequently. 

Noticing the approach of an outsider, the last-Iegger quickly 

gathers up everything set out there which he has not yet eaten, 

presses his mess tin to his chest, falls to the ground, and curls up 

in a ball like a hedgehog. And now he can be beaten, shoved-but 

he is firmly on the ground, he won't stir, and he won't give up his 

mess tin. . 

·N.K.G. speaks to him in a friendly voice-and the hedgehog 

uncurls a bit. He sees his visitor does not intend to beat him or 

take away his mess tin. A conversation ensues. They are both 

engineers (N.G. a geologist, and Y. a chemist), and now Y. 

discloses to G. his own faith. Basing himself on his still-remembered 

formulas for the chemical composItion of substances, he 

demonstrates that one can get everything nutritionally necessary 

from refuse; one merely,has to overcome one's squeamishness and 

direct all one's efforts to extracting nourishment from this source. 

Notwithstanding the heat, Y. is dressed in several layers of 

clothes, all dirty. (And he had a basis for this too: Y. had established 

·experimentally that lice and fleas will not multiply in 

extremely dirty clothing, as though they theInselves were squeamish. 

Therefore he had ~ven picked out for one of his undergarments 

a piece of wiping in the repair shop.) 

Here was how he looked: He wore a Budenny helmet with a 

black candle stump in place of the spiked peak; the helmet was 

covered with scorch marks. In some· places hay and in some 

places oakum adhered to the greasy elephant ears of the helmet. 

From his outer clothing tom pieces and tatters stuck out like 

'tongues on his back and sides. Patches and patches. A layer of 

tar on one side. The cotton-wool linipg was hanging· out in a 

fringe along the hem. Both outer sleeves were tom to the elbows, 

and when the last-Iegger raised his arms-he looked like a bat

- ------- -'~'" 

The 'Way of Life and Customs of the Natives I 213 

shaking its wings. And on his feet were boatlike rubber overshoes 

glued together from red automobile tires. 

Why was he dressed so warmly? In the first place, the summer 

was short and the winter long, and it was necessary to keep everything 

he had for the winter, and where else could he keep it except 

on himself? In the second place, the principal reason, he created 

by this means a soft and well-padded exterior, and thus did not 

feel pain when he was struck. He could be kicked and beaten 

with sticks without getting bruised. This was his one defense. All 

he had to do was be quick enough to see who was about to strike 

him, drop to the ground in time, pull his knees up to.his stomach, 

thus covering it, press his head down to his chest and embrace it 

with his thickly padded arms. Then the only places they could hit 

him were padded. And, so that no one should beat him for too 

long at a time-it was necessary quickly to give the person beating 

him a feeling of triumph. And to this end Y. had learned to 

howl hideously, like a piglet, from the very first blow, even though 

he wasn't hurting in the least. (For in camp they are very fond of 

beating up the weak-not only the work assigners and the brigadiers, 

but the ordinary zeks as well-so as not to {eel completely 

weak themselves. And what was to be done if people simply could 

not believe' in their own strength unless they. subjected others to 

cruelty?) 

And to Y. this seemed a fully endurable and reasonably chosen 

way of life-and one, in addition, which did not require him to 

soil his conscience! He did nobody harm! 

He hoped to survive his term. . 

The interview with the last-Iegger is over . 

• 

In our glorious Fatherland, which was capable for more than a 

hundred years of not publishing the work of Chaadayev because 

of his reactionary views, you see, you are not likely to surprise 

anyone with the fact that the most important and boldest books 

are never read by contemporaries, never exercise an influence on 

popular thought in good time. And thus it is that I amwritiilg 

this book solely from a sense of obligation-because too many , 

stories. and recollections have accumulated in my hands and I 

214 -I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

cannot allow them to perish. I do not expect to see it in print anywhere 

with my own eyes; and I have little hope that those who 

managed -to drag their bones out of the Archipelago will ever 

read it; and I do not at all believe that it will explain the truth of 

our history in time for anything to be corrected. In the very heat 

of working on this book I was struck by the greatest shock of my 

life: The dragon emerged for one minute, licked up my novel 

with his wicked rough red tongue, and several other old works* 

and retired behind the curtain for the time. But I can hear his 

breathing, and I know that his teeth are aimed at my neck, that it 

is just that my time is not up yet. And with devastated soul I am . 

going to gather my strength to complete this investigation, so that 

it at least may escape the dragon's teeth. In the days when Sholokhov, 

who has long since ceased to be a writer, journeyed from this 

country of harried and arrested writers to receive a Nobel prize, 

I was trying to duck the dicks, seeking a hiding place and trying 

to win time for my clandestine, panting pen to complete this very 

book. 

I have digressed, but what I wanted to say was that in our 

country the best books remain unknown to their contemporaries, 

and it is very possible that I am therefore vainly. repeating the 

secret work of someone else, wh,en, had I known of it, I could 

have made my own work shorter. But during the seven years of 

.our frail. and pale-freedom some things did nevertheless emerge, 

despite everything, and one swimmer in the dawn-lit ocean has 

spied another head and cried out in a wheezy voice to him. And 

it was in this way that I lell111ed of Shalamov's sixty camp stories 

and of his study of the thieves. 

I want to declare here that, apart from several individual points 

on which we disagree, no difference of interpretation has ever 

arisen between us in explaining the Archipelago. He and I evaluate 

the whole native life in the same way. Shalamov's camp experience 

was more bitter and longer than mine, and.I acknowledge 

with esteem that it fell to him rather than to me to plumb those 

depths of beastliness and despair to which the whole camp way of 

life was dragging us all down. 

This, however, does not prohibit my raising objections to specific 

points on which we disagree. one such point is the evaluation 

of the camp Medical Section. Shalamov speaks with hate and gall 

(and rightly too!) of every camp establishment, but he always 

makes a biased exception solely for the Medical Section. He sup-


ports, if he does not create, a legend about the benign camp 

Medical Section. He affirms that everything in the camp was 

against the camp inmate except the doctor-he alone could help 

him. 

That he can help still doesn't mean that he does. He can help, 

if he so desires, just as the construction superintendent, the norm 

setter, the bookkeeper, the storeroom clerk, the cook, the orderly, 

and the work assigner can too-but do many of them actually 

help? , 

Perhaps up to 1932, when, the camp Medical Sections were-still 

subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Health, the doctors 

could still be doctors. But in 1932 the Medical'Sections were 

turned over in toto to Gulag-and it became their goal to help 

the oppressors and to be gravediggers. So, leaving aside the goOd 

cases with goOd doctoI'S-:-just who would have kept those Medical 

Sections in the Archipelago at all if they had not served the common 

purpose? 

When the commandant and the brigadier beat up on a lastlegger 

because he refused to go out to work-so badly that he was 

left licking his wounds like a dog and lay unconscious for two 

days in a punishment cell (Babich), and for two months afterward 

could not even crawl down from the bunks-was it not the 

Medical Section (at Camp No.1 of the Dzhida group of camps) 

that refused to draw up official certification of the beating and 

subsequently to treat him? . 

And who was it if not the Medical Section that signed every' 

decree for imprisonment in the punishment block? (Incidentally, 

let us not lose sight of the fact that the chiefs did not have all that 

great a need for that doctor's signature. In the camp near· the 

Indigirka, S. A. Chebotaryov was a free "plasterer" [a medical assistant-this 

term "eing, not by chance, a piece of camp slang 

too]. He did not sign a single one of the camp chiefs decrees for 

imprisonment in the punishment block, since he considered that 

even a dog shouldn't be put in such a punishment block, let alone 

people; the stove only warmed the jailer out in the corridor. That 

was all right; incarcerations took place there without his signature.) 

When, through the fault of the construction superintendent or 

~ht foreman, or because of the absence of fencing or safety precautionS, 

a zek died at work, who was it if not the medical assistant 

and the Medical Section that signed the certificate attesting 


that he had died of a heart attack? (And what that meant was 

that everything could be left just as it was and tomorrow others 

would die. Otherwise, the medical assistant would soon be working 

at the mine face himself! And the doctor too!) 

When quarterly commissioning took place-that comedy of 

general medical examination of the camp population with assignment 

to categories: TFT (Heavy Physical Labor), SFT 

(Average Physical Labor), LFT (Light Physical Labor), and 

IFf (Individual Physical Labor)-were there many good doctors 

who opposed the evil chief of the Medical Section, who was kept 

in his job only because he supplied columns for heavy labor? 

Or perhaps the Medical Section was at least merciful to those 

willing to sacrifice a part of their-own bodies in order to save 

the rest? Everyone knows the law, not just in one camp or another: 

Self-mutilators, self-maimers, and self-incapacitators were 

refused all medical help! This was an administration order, but 

who actually refused the help? The doctors . . . Let's say you've 

blown off four of your fingers with a dynamite cap, and you've 

come to the infirmary-they give you no bandage: Drop dead, 

dog! And back atthe Moscow-Volga Canal during the wave of 

universal competition, for some reason (?) too many cases of selfmaiming 

suddenly appeared. And there was an immediate explanation: 

this was a sally of the class enemy. And was one then 

to treat them? (Of course, much.d~pended here on the cleverness 

of the zek who had maimed himself: it was possible to do it in 

such a way that it could not be proved. And Bernshtein scalcJed his 

hand adroitly with boiling water poured through a cloth-and 

thus saved his life. Another might adroitly freeze his hand by not 

wearing a mitten or else urinate in his felt boots and go out into 

the bitter coM. But you couldn't take everything into account: 

gangrene could set in and death would follow. Sometimes there 

were cases of unforeseen self-incapacitation: Babich's"unhealing 

scurvy ulcers were diagnosed as syphilis and there was nowhe~e 

to make a blood test; he thereupon cheerfully lied that he and his 

entire family had syphilis. He was moved into the venereal-disease 

zone of the camp and by this means"he postponed his death.) 

Was there ever a time when the Medical Section excused from 

work all the prisoners genuinely ill on a given day? Or when it 

didn't drive a given number of seriously ill people out of the 

camp compound to work? Dr. Suleimanov refused to put Pyotr


J 

Kishkin, the hero and comedian of the zek people, into the hospital 

because his diarrhea did not satisfy the norm: every halfhour, 

and it had to be bleeding. So when the column formed up 

to go to the work site, Kishkin sat down, running the risk of 

getting shot. But the convoy turned out to be more merciful than 

the doctor: they stopped a passing car and sent Kishkin to the 

hospital. People will object that the Medical Section was held to 

a strictly limited percentage of Group "C"-inpatients and -ambulatory 

cases." So there was an e~planation-in every case, but 

in every case there also remained a cruelty-in no wise outweighed 

by the consideration that "on the other -hand" they were doing 

good to "someone else." 5 ' 

And then we have to bring in here the horrible camp hospitals, 

like the one at Camp No.2 of Krivoshchekovo: a small reception 

room, a toilet, and a hospital room. The toilet stank and 

filled the hospital air, but was that the worst of it? In each hospital 

cot lay two diarrhea patients, and others were lying on the 

floor between cots. Those who had grown weak evacuated in 

their cots. There were no linens or medicines (1948-1949). The 

hospital was ruft by a third-year medical student (a S8 himself). 

He was desperate, but there was nothing he could do. The hospital 

orderlies who were supposed to feed the patients were strong, 

fat young fellows. They ate the patients' food,. stealing from th_eir 

hospital ration. Who had put them in their cushy spots? The 

godfather, no doubt. The student didn't have the strength to get 

rid of them or defend the patients' rations. But would any doctor 

have had it either?lO 

Or could it Jl'>ssibly be contended that the Medical Section in 

every camp was able to insist on really human nutrition? Well, 

at least to the extent of not having those "night-blind brigades" 

9. Doctors got around that as best they could. In Sym Camp they organized 

a semihospital; the last-Ieggers lay there on their pea jackets and went out to 

shovel snow, but were fed from the hospital rations. The free chief of the 

Medical Department, A. M. Statnikov, got around the Group "COO quota in 

the following way: he cut back on the hospitals in the working compounds 

but in turn expanded the hospital camps, i.e., camps entirely for the sick. In 

the official Gulag documents they sometimes even wrote: "Raise the physical 

fitness of the zeks"-but they refused to give any funds for this purpose. In 

fact. the very complexity of these subterfuges of honest physicians proves that 

the Medical Sections were not allowed to interfere with the death 'process. 

10. Dostoyevsky entered the hospital without any _hindrance. And the Medical 

Section in his prison was the same for both prisoners and convoy. What 

immaturity I 


returning from work in the evenings in a line of the night-blind, 

clinging to one another? No. If by some miracle some intervention 

did secure an improvement in nutrition, it would only 

have been the work adIninistration, so as to have strong sloggers. 

And certainly never the Medical Section. 

No one is blaIning the physicians for all this (though their 

courage to resist was often weak because they were afraid of 

being sent to general work), but the legends about the saviocifrom 

the Medical Sections aren't needed either. Like every branch 

of the camp administration, the Medical Section, too, was born 

of the devil and filled with the devil's blood. 

Corl-tinuing his tho~ght, Shalamov says that the prisoner in 

camp could count only on the Medical Section and that he could 

not count on the work of his own hands, that he did not dare: 

this led to the grave. "In camp it is not the small ration that kills 

but the big one." 

The saying is true: The big ration is the one that kills. In one 

season of hauling timber the strongest slogger would end up 

a hopeless last-legger himself. At that point he would be certified 

a temporary invalid: fourteen ounces of bread and gruel 

from the bottom-ranking "pot." During the winter, a number of 

sug. people died (well, say 725 out of 800). The rest of them 

went onto "light physical" work and died on that. 

So what other way out can we offer Ivan Denisovich if they. 

are unwilling to take him on as a medical assistant or a hospital 

attendant, and also won't fake him a release from work for even 

one day? If he is too short on schooling and tao long on conscience-to 

get himself fixed up with a job as trusty in. the camp 

compound? Is there any other course left him than to put his 

trust in his own two hands? What about the Rest Point (the OP)? 

What about maiming- himself? And what about early release on 

medical grounds-"aktirovka"'! 

Let Ivan Denisovich talk about them in his own words. For 

he has given them plenty of thought. He had the time. 

"The Rest Point-the OP-that's like a camp rest home. Tens 

of years the zeks .bend their backs, don't get vacations, so they 

have Rest Points-for two weeks. They feed much better there 

and they're not driven outside the camp compound to work, and


- 

in the compound they only put in three, four hours of real easy 

work: pounding rocks to pave roads, cleaning up the compound, 

or making repairs. And if there were half a thousand people in 

the camp--they'd open a 'Rest Point for fifteen. And then if 

everything had been divided up honestly; everyone wQuld have 

gotten Rest Point once in just over a year., But just as there was 

no justice in anything in camp, there was especially none with 

Rest Points. They would open up a Rest Point sneakily, the way 

a dog snaps, and right off there would be lists ready for three 

whole shifts there. Then they would shut it down quick as a wink 

too-it wouldn't last half a year. The types who pushed in would 

be the bookkeepers, barbers, shoemakers, tailors-the whole 

aristocracy, with just a few real sloggers thrown in for the look 

of the thing-the best workers, they said. And then the tailor 

Beremblyum would shove under your nose, 'I made a fur coat for 

somebody outside and a thousand rubles was paid the camp 

cashier for it, and you, idiot, haul beams a whole month and the 

camp doesn't even get a hundred rubles for you, so who's the 

. best worker? Who should get Rest Point?' And so there you go 

around, your, heart bleeding, trying to figure how to get -into 

Rest Point just to catch your breath a little bit, and before you 

look around it has already been shut down, and that's the end of 

it.. And the sorest point of all is that at least they could enter in 

your prison file that you had been at a Rest Point in such and 

such a year-it wasn't that they didn't have enough bookkeepers 

in camp. No, they wouldn't. Because it was no good to them. The 

next year they'd open up a Rest Point again-and again Ber-. 

emblyum would be in the first shift, and again you'd be bypassed. 

In the course of ten years they'd roll you sideways- through ten 

camps and in the tenth you'd beg them just to let you poke your 

nose in the OP to see what it was like, whether the waIls were 

painted decently and so on, because after all you'd never been 

in one your whole term-but how could you prove it? 

"No, no point in getting worked up about the Rest Points. 

"But maiming yourself was ano,ther mater~ To cripple yourself 

but still stay alive and become an invalid. As they say: one 

minute's endurance-and a year of loafing. Break your leg, and 

then stop the bone from knitting right. Drink salt water and swell 

up. And smoke tea-spoil your heart. Or drink stewed tobacco 

-good for wrecking the lungs. But you had to be careful not'to 


overdo, hurting yourself so badly that you leapfrogged invalidism 

into the grave. And who knew just how far to go? 

nI~' many ways, an invalid didn't have things too bad: he filight 

be able to get himself a spot in the cookhouse, or the bast-sandal 

shop. But the main thing smart people were looking for,in making 

themselves invalids was early release on health grounds- 

'aktirovka.' Except that 'aktirovka,' especially in waves, was 

even harder than getting into Rest Points,. They got together a 

commission, inspected the invalids, and for the very worst of 

them wrote up an 'act'-a certificate: from such and such a date, 

because of state of health, so-and-so is classified as unsuited to 

serve out his term further, and we petition for his release. 

"We only petition! And while this certificate proceeded upward 

to the higher-ups and then back down again you could cash in 

your chips. That happened often. After all, the higher-ups were 

sly bastards. They rele~ed ahead of time on health grounds those 

who were going to kick the bucket in a month anyway.n And 

also the ones who could pay well. There was a confederate of 

Kalikman who had go~ away with half a million-she' paid a 

hundred thousand---'and went free. Not like us fools. 

"There used to be a book· going around the barracks, and 

the students read it aloud in their corner. In it there was one 

fellow who got himself a million and didn't know what to do 

with his million under Soviet power-there wasn't supposed to 

be anything to buy, and you could die of starvati(~m with it, with 

that million. We used to laugh: Tell that bull to someone else. 

As for us, we've seen quite a few of those millionaires walk out 

of camp too. You can't buy God's health back for a million, but 

you can buy freedom, and buy power; ~d buy people too, lock, 

stock, and barrel. And there are oh, oh, oh, so many of those 

who have piled up millions out in freedom too; only they just 

don't shout it from the housetops or wave their arms about when 

they have i!. 

"But for the 58's early release for health is a closed door. 

During all the time the camps have existed, they say that maybe 

three times, for a month apiece, prisoners sentenced under Section 

10 were released early for health, and then that door, too, 

11. In O. Volkov's story "Grandfathers," those old men released for bad 

health were driven out of camp, but they had nowhere to go, and hung on 

right in the vicinity to die-without the bread' ration and shelter they had in 

camp.

The wai of Life and Customs of the Natives 221 

was slammed shut. And no one will take money from them, from 

the enemies of the people. If you did, you'd be putting your own 

head on the block in place of theirs. Yes, and they don't have 

any money, those 'politicians.''' 

"What do you mean, Ivan Denisych, they don't have any?" 

"Well, all right, we don't have any ... !' \ 

• • 

But there is one form of early release that no bluecap can take 

away from the pnsoner. This release is---death. 

And this is the most basic, the steadiest form of Archipelago 

output there is-with no norms. 

f:rom the fall of 1938 to February, 1939, at one of the Ust 

Vym camps, 385 out of 550 prisoners tlied. Certain work brigades 

(Ogurtsov) died off totally, including the brigadiers. In 

the autumn of 1941, Pechorlag (the railroad camp) had a listed 

population of fifty thousand prisoners, and in the spring of 1942, 

ten thousand. During this period not one prisoner transport was 

sent out of Pechorlag anywhere-so where did the forty thousand 

prisoners go? I have written thousand-here in italic~why? Because 

I learned these figures accidentally from ~ zek who had 

access to them. But you would not be able to get them for all, 

camps in all periods nor to total them up. In the central sector 

of Burepolom Camp, in the barracks housing the last-Ieggers, in 

. ~ebruary, 1943, out of fifty people there'were never fewer than 

four deaths a night, and one night there were twelve. In the morning 

their places were taken by new last-Ieggers who dreamed of 

recuperating on a diet of thin magara* gruel and fourteen ounces 

of bread. . 

Corpses withered from pellagra (no buttocks, and women 

with no breasts), or rotting from scurvy, were checked out in 

the m?rgue cabin and sometimes in the open air. This was seldom 

like an autopsy-a long vertical cut from -neck to crotch, 

breaking leg bones, pulling the skull apart at its seam. Mostly 

it warnot a surgeon but a convoy'guard who verified the corpse 

-to be certain the zek was really dead and not pretending. And 

for this they ran the corpse through with a bayonet or smashed 

the slpill with a big mallet. And right there they tied to the big toe 

of ~e corpse's right foot a tag with his pri$on file number, under 

which he was identified in the prison lists. 

222' I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

At one time they used to bury them in their underwear but 

later on in the very worst, lowest-grade, which was dirty gray. 

And then came an across-the-board regulation not to waste any 

underwear on them at all (it coQld. still be used for the livfug) 

but to bury them naked. 

At one time in Old Russia it was thought that a corpse could 

not get along without a coffin. Even the lowliest serfs, beggars, 

and tramps were buried in coffins. Even the Sakhalin and the 

Akatui hard-labor prisoners were buried in coffins. But in the 

Archipelago this would have amounted to the unproductive expenditure 

of millions on labor and lumber. When at Inta after 

the war one honored foreman of the woodworking plant was 

actually buried in a coffin, the Cultural and Educational Section 

was instructed to make propaganda: Work well and you, too, 

will be buried in a woollen (:offin. 

The corpses were hauled away on sledges or on carts, depending 

on the time of year. Sometimes, for convenience, they used 

one box for six corpses, and if there were ·no boxes, then they 

tied the hands and legs with cord so they didn't flop about. After 

this they piled them up like logs and covered them with bast 

matting. If' there was ammonal available, a special brigade of 

gra\ICdiggers would dynamite pits for them. Otherwise they had 

to dig the graves, always common graves, in the ground: either 

big ones for a birge number or shallow ones for four at a time. 

(In the springtime, a stink ulled to waft into the camp from the 

shallower graves, and they would then send last-Ieggers to deepen 

them.) 

On the other hand, no one can accuse us Qf gas chambers. 

Where there was more time to spare on such things-as, for 

example, in Kengir:-they would set out little posts on the hillocks, 

and a representative of the Records and Classification 

Section, no less, would personally inscribe on them the inventory 

numbers of those buried there. However, in Kengir someone 

also did some wrecking: Mothers and wives who came there were 

shown the cemetery and they went there to mourn and' weep. 

Thereupon the chief of Steplag, Comrade Colonel Chechev. ordered 

the bulldozers to bulldoze down the little grave posts and 

level off the hi1ock~because of this lack of gratitude. 

Now that, fair reader, is how your father, your husband, your 

brother, was buried.

The Way of Life and Customs Of the Natives I 223 

And that is how the path of the nativc:: and his way of life . . . 

come to an end. 

But as a mattet: of fact it was Pavel Bykov who said: "Until 

twenty-four hours have passed after death, don't be so sure that 

it's all over." 

• 

"Well, Ivan Denisovich, what is there lei .. that we haven't yet 

recounted? From the routine of our' daily lives'?" 

"Whooo! You haven't even begun. It would take as many years 

as you served to tell it all. Like about the zek who broke formation 

to chase a cigarette butt apd the convoy guard shot him.1.2 

How the invalid zeks in the kitchen gulped down raw potatoes: 

once cooked they'd not get any. How tea was used in place of 

money in camps. How they used to brew up a superstrong tea 

mix-l * ounces to a glass-andget a high. But that was mostly 

the thieves. They used to buy tea from the free employees with 

stolen money. 

"And how did a zek manage to live on the whole? If he couldn't 

manage to weave string from sand-if he wasn't both tight-fisted 

and ingenioUS'--he couldn't survive. Even in his sleep the zek had 

to keep thinking how to dodge and twist his way through the 

next day. And if you got your hands on something, or sniffed 

out some loophole-then keep your mouth shut! Keep it shut, or . 

else the guys next to you would find out-and mess it all up. 

That's how it is in camp: there just isn't enough for everyone 

anyway, so see to it there's enough for you. 

"Well that's as may be, but stil~ven in camp you have the 

old human custom of making friends. Not only old friendships- 

codefendants or comrades from out in freedom-but new ones 

made here. People's hearts went out to each other and they confided 

in each other. Buddies! Whatever we have we-share, and 

whatever we don't-fifty-fifty. It's true that we keep our precious 

bread ration. separate, but everything gotten hold of otherwise is 

cooked in one mess tin and ladled from the same one. IS 

. 12. In Dostoyevsky's time a prisoner could leave 'formation to beg alms. 

And in formation the prisoners used to chat and sing. 

13. For some reason, in the hard·labor regime described by Dostoyevsky 

friendship di~ not flourish and no one paired off even to eat. 

.224 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

"There were buddies who stayed together a short time and 

others who stayed together a long time. Some pairings were 

based ... on conscience and others . . . on deceit. Like a snake, 

the 'godfather' used to.like to crawl in between such friendships. 

Over a common mess tin and in a whisper you'd talk about everything. 

"The old zeks admit and the former POW's will tell you too: . 

The one who sells you down the river is the one who ate from 

the mess tin with you. 

"And that's also a partial truth. 

"But the best deal is not to have a buddy but a girl buddy. 

A camp wife, a zechka. * As they used to say, to get submarried. 

What was good if you were young was to ---her somewhere 

in a one-night shack-up, and that would do your soul good. 

And even for an old, weak guy it was stilI good. You could get 

something an~ay, earn a favor, maybe she would do your washing 

for you, bring it to your barracks, put your shirt under your 

pillow, and no one would laugh-it was in the law. She would 

cook for you too, you would sit down on your cot next to each 

other and eat. And that kind of camp espousal would suit even 

an old chap particularly well, just barely warm with a little touch 

of bitter flavor. You'd look at her through the steam from the 

mess pot-and there were wrinkles on her face, yes, and on 

your own too. You were both in gray camp rags, your padded 

jackets were all stained with rust and clay and lime and alabaster 

and lubricating grease. You never knew her before, and you 

had never set foot on her -native soil, and she didn't talk like 

one of 'ours' either. And outin freedom her children were growing 

up, and yours too. And she had left a husband there toowho 

was skirt-chasing. And your own wife had been left alone 

too, and she wasn't letting the grass grow under her feet. either: 

after all, eight years, ten years, everyone wants to live. And this, 

~uoy camp wife, drags the same chain as you do and doesn't 

complain. 

"And we live-not like people. And we die-not like parents. 

"Some zeks got visits from their real wives. In various camps 

under various chiefs they were allowed to sit together for 

twenty minutes in the gatehouse. And there were even cases 

wbere they spent a night or two together in a separate shack. If 

you were a 150 percenter. But these visits were nothing more than 

poison. Why touch her with your hands and talk with her about


something if you still had years and years to go before living with 

her again? It split the men in two. With a camp wife everything 

is clearer: Between us we have .one cup of grits left; they say 

we're going to get burnt sugar this coming week. It won't be 

white, of course, the rats . . . Lathe operator Rodichev's wife 

came to visit him, and just before she arrived his shack-up bit him 

on the neck while making love. Rodichev swore a blue streak 

because his wife was coming, and off he went to the Medical 

Section to get a bandage put on his bruise: I can say I caught 

cold. 

"And what kind of women were there in camp? There were 

women thieves and there were loose. women and there were 

politicals, but most of all there were lowly and humble women 

sent there under the decree. They were all sent up under the 

decree for theft of state property. During and after the war, who 

crowded all the factories full? Women and girls. And who had 

to feed the family? They. And what were they to feed ~e family 

with? Need knows no law. And so they would pilfer: they used 

to put sourcream-m their pockets, sneak out rolls between their 

legs, wind stockings around their waists, and the' likeliest way 

was to go to work barefoot and grab new stockings there at work, 

put them on ana wash them at home and tak~ them to the open 

market to sell. Whoever produced something would swipe that. 

They would stick a spool of thread between their breasts. All the 

watchmen had been bribed, for they had to live too, and they 

only picked off a few, hit or miss. And then the guard would 

jump in and there would be a body search-and it was ten years 

for that shitty spool! The same as for treason! And thousands got 

caught with those spools. 

"Everyone was on the take to the extent that her work permitted 

it. Nastya Gurkina had it good-she used to work iIi the 

baggage cars. And she reasoned things out quite correctly: Our 

own Soviet people are persistent bastards and they'll jump at your 

throat just for a lousy towel. Therefore she never touched Soviet 

suitcases and cleaned out only foreigners'. The foreigner, she 

said, wouldn't even think to check up on his things in time, 

and by the time he found out about it, he wouldn't bother to write 

a complaint, and all he would do was spit out: "Russian thieves!" 

And he would go back to his own country. 

"Shitarev, an old bookkeeper, used to reproach Nastya: -'You 

ought to be ashamed of yourself, you're just a piece of meat! 


'Why .lidn't you think about the honor of Russia?' And she would 

tell him off: 'Up yours, and stand still for it toot Why didn't you 

worry about Victory? You used to let all those gentlemen officers 

go home to play stud dog.' (Shitarev had been a hospital 

bookk;eeper during the war, and the officers used to grease his 

palm so that he would extend their period of sick leave by forging 

their travel documents, and they could go home before returning 

to the front. This was very serious. Shitarev had been sentenced 

to be shot, and only later was his sentence commuted to a 

'tenner.') 

"Of course, there were all kinds of unfortunates serving time 

as well. One woman got a 'fiver' for fraud: her husband had died 

in the middle of the month and she went on collecting his bread 

rations till the end' of the month without turning the card in, 

using it for herself and for her two children. Her neighbors informed 

on her out of jealousy. She served four years too--and 

one year :-vas knocked o~ by the amnesty. 

"And this could happen too: A house was bombed out, the' I 

wife and children were killed and the husband was left. All the 

ration cards were burned, but the husband was out of his mind 

and lived through the whole thirteen days until the end of the 

month without bread rations and did not ask for a ration card 

for himself. Therefore they suspected that all his ration cards 

were intact. They gave him three years. And he served one and 

a half of the three." 

Now just a minute there, just a minute, Ivan Denisych, that's 

all for another time. And so you are telling us about a girl buddy, 

right? About "submarriage"? She drags the same chain you do 

-and doesn't eomplain?


Chapter 8 

• 

Women-in ,Camp 

, 

And how could one not think of them, even back during interrogation? 

After all, th~y were somewhere here in neighboring 

cells! In this very same prison, under this very same regimen, 

enduring this unbearable interrogation-and how cOuld they 

bear it, such weak: beings? . 

The corridors were soundless, and you could not ~stinguish 

their walk or the rustle of their dres~.But one day, .one of the 

Butyrki jailers was fu~sing with a Jock, and'left our men's cell 

to. stand half a mfuute at the windows in the well-lit upper corridor, 

and, peering underneath the "muzzle" 'of a corridor 

window, we suddenly saw down below, in the little green garden 

on a comer of asphalt, standing in line in pairs like uil-and also 

waiting for a door to be opened-women's shoes and ankles! All 

we could see were just ankles and shoes, but on high heels! And 

it was like a Wagnerian blast from Tristan, and Isolde. We could 

see no higher than that and the jailer was already driving us intO 

the cell, and once inside we raved there, illumined .and at the 

same time beclouded, and we pictured' all the rest to o~ves, 

imagining ,them as heavenly beings dying of despondency. What 

were they like? What were they like! 

But it seems that things were no harder for them and maybe 

,!:ven easier. I have so far found nothing in women's recollections 

of interr,ogation which could lead me to conclude that they were 

any more disheartened than we wer~ or that they became any 

more deeply depressed. The gynecologist N. I. Zubov, who 

served ten years himself and who in camp was constantly engaged 

in treating and observing women, says, to be sure, that statistically 

women react more swiftly and more sharply to arrest than men 

and to its principal effect-the loss of the family. The woman 

arrested is spiritually wounded and this expresses itself most often, 

in the cessation of the vulnerable female functions. . 

But what particularly su,rprised me in the women's recollections 

of interrogation, was what "trifles" from a prisoner's point 

of: view (but not at all from a woman's) they could be thinking 

,about there. Nadya Sur9vtseva, pretty and stilI young, hastily 

pulled on stockings that didn't match to go to her interrogation, 

and there in the interrogator's office she was embarrassed because 

the interr.ogator kept looking at her legs. You would think she 

. should be saying: The heIl with him! Horseradish on his snoot! 

It wasn't as if she were going'to the theater with him, and besides 

she was almast a doctor of philosophy-in the Western sense- 

and a fervid political partisan-so who would have thought it! 

And Aleksandra Ostretsova, imprisoned in the Big Lubyanka in 

1943, told me later on in camp that they used to kid around in. 

there: they would hide under the table and' the. scared jailer 

would come in to look for the one who was missing; or they 

would paint themselves red with beet jlliceand go out like that 

for their walk. Or already summoned to interrogation, she would 

have an animated discussion with her cellmates whether she 

should dress simply that day or put on her evening dress. True, 

Ostretsova was at that time a' spoiled, naughty young girl and 

was imprisoned with young Mira Uborevich. But another 

prisoner, N. I, P--'Va, older and a scientist, used to sharpen 

her aluminum spoon in her ceIl. And why do you think-to cut 

her throat? No, to cut off her braids (and she did cut them off)!' 

Subsequently, in the yard at Krasnaya Presnya I happened to 

be next to a prisoner'transport of women who like us had been 

recently sentenced. And with astonishment I saw that they were 

not so thin, not so emaciated and pale as we were. Equal prison 

rations for all and equal prison torments turn out on the average 

to be easier for women. They do not weaken so quickIy3rom 

hunger. 

But of course for aJ,,1 of us, and for women in particular, prison 

was just the flower. 'rhe berries came later--camp. And it was 

precisely in camp that the women would either be broken or else, 

by bending and degenerating, adapt themselves. 

227·

Women in Camp I 229 

In camp it was the opposite-=-everything was harder for the 

women than for us men. Beginning with the camp filth. Having 

already suffered from the dirt in the transit prisons and on the 

prisoner transports themselves, the woman would -then find no 

cleanliness in camp either. In the average camp, in the women's 

work brigades, and also, it goes without saying, in the common 

ban:acks, it was almost never possible for her to feel really clean, 

.to get warm water (and sometimes there was no water at all: 

in winter at Krivoshchekovo Camp No. 1 it was impossible to 

wash anywhere in the whole place. The only water was frozen and 

there was nowhere to thaw it). There was no lawful way.a 

woman could lay hands on either cheesecloth or rags. No place 

there, of course, to do laundry! . 

A bath? Well! The initial arrival in camp began with a bath- . 

i(one doesn't take into account the unloading of the zeIcs from 

the" cattle car onto the snow, and the march across with one's 

things on one's back surrounded by C01:"llY and dogs. 'In the 

CIPDP bath the naked women were examined ~e merchandise. 

Whether there was water in the bath or not, the inspection for 

lice, the shaving of armpits and pubic hair, gave the barbers, by 

no means the lowest-ranking aristocrats in the camp, the opportunity 

to look over the new women. And : immediately after 

that they would be inspected by the other trusties. This was a 

tradition going right back to the Solovetsky Islands. Except that 

. there, at the dawn of the Archipelago, a shyness stillexisted, not 

typical of the natives-and they were inspected clot}ted,_ during 

auxiliary work. But the Archipelago hardened, and the procedure 

became more brazen. Fedot S. and his wife (it was their fate to 

be united!) now recollect with amu.;_ment how the male trusties 

stood on either side of a narrow corridor and passed the newly 

arrived women through the corridor naked, hot all at once, but 

one at a time. And -then the trusties decided among themselves 

who got whom. (According to the statistics of the twenti~s there 

was one woman serving time fr every six or seven men.! After 

the decrees of the thirties and forties the proportion of women 

- to men rose substantially-but still not sufficiently for women not 

to be valued, particularly the attractive ones.) In certain camps a 

polite procedure was preserved: The women were conducted to 

I. Vysbinsky. op. cit •• p. 3S8. 


their barracks-and then the well-fed, self-confident, and impudent 

trusties entered the barracks, dressed in new padded 

jackets (any clothing in camp which was not in tatters and soiled 

seemed mad foppery). Slowly and deliberately they strolled between 

the bunks and made their choices. They sat down and 

chatted. They invited their choices to "visit" them. And they 

were livmg, too, not in a common-barracks situation, but in 

cabins occupied by several men. And there they had hot plates 

and frying pans. And they had fried potatoes too! An unbelievable 

dream! The first time, the chosen women were simply 

feasted and given the chance to make comparisons and to· discover 

the whole- spectrum of camp life. Impatient trusties demanded 

"payment" right after the potatoes,w.hile those more 

de~iartser escorted th~ir dates home and explained the future. 

You'd better make your arrangements, make your arrangements, 

inside _ the camp compound, darling, while it is being proposed 

in a- gentlemanly way. There's cleanliness here, and laundry 

facilities, and decent clothes and unfatiguing work-and it's all 

yours. 

And in this sense it is considered to have been "easier" for 

women in camp. It was "easier" for women to preserve life itself. 

And with that "sexual hatred" with which certain of the lastleggers 

looked on those women in camp who had not descended 

to pickings from the slops, it was natural to reason that it was 

easier for women in camp, since they could get along on a 

_lesser ration, and had a way to avoid starvation and remain alive. - 

For the man crazed by hunger the entire world is overshadowed 

by the wings of hunger, and nothing else in the -world is of any 

importance. 

And it is true there are women who by their own nature, out 

in {reedom too, by and large, get together with men easily, without 

-being choosy. Such -women, of course~ always had open to 

them easy ways out. Personal characteristics do not get distributed 

simply on the basis of the articles of the Criminal Code, yet we 

are not likely to be in error if we say that the majority of women 

among the 58's were not of this kind. For sOl!le of them, from 

the beginning to the end, this step was less bearable than death. 

Others would bridle, hesitate, be embarrassed (and they were 

held back by shame before their girl friends too), and when they 

had finally decided, when they had reconciled themselves-it 

might be tOQ late, they might not find a camp taker any longer.


Because not every one was lucky enough to get propositioned. 

Thus many of them gave in during the first few days. The future 

looked too cruel-and there was no hope at all. And this choice 

was made by those who were alJt10st little girls, along with 

solidly married women and mothers of families. And it was the 

little girls in particular, stifled by the crudity of camp life, who 

quickly became the most reckless of all. 

What if you said . . . no? All right, that's your lookout! Put 

on britches and pea jacket. And go marching off to the woods, 

with your formless, fat exterior; and your fraiI inner being. You'll 

come crawling yet. You'll go down on bended knees. 

If you have arrived in camp in good physical shape, and if you 

have made a wise decision at the very beginning-then you are 

all set for a long stay, in the Medical Section, in the kitchen, in 

the bookk.eeping office, in the sewing shop or in the laundry, and 

the years. will flow past comfortably enough, quite like out in 

freedom. And if a prisoner transport comes your way, you will 

arrive in your new place, too, in full flower, and you will already 

know how to act there from the very start. One of the most 

successful moves you can make . . . is to become a servant to ' 

one of the chiefs. When I.N. arrived in camp on a new prisoner 

transport, she was a portly, well-preserved woman, who for 

many years had been the prosperous wife of a high army commander. 

The chief of the Records and Classification Section 

immediately spotted her and "gave her the post of honor of 

washing floors in the chiefs office. And that is how she began 

serving out her term in a soft spot, fully aware that this was a 

piece of luck. 

And what of it if you loved someone out in freedom' and 

wanted to remain true to him? What profit is there in the fidelity 

of a female corpse? "When you get back to freedom-who is 

going to need you?" Those were the words which kept ringing 

eternally through the women's barracks. You grow coarse and 

old and your last years as a wODlan are cheerless and empty. 

Isn't it smarter to hurry up and grab something too, even from 

this savage life? 

And it was all made easier by the fact that no one here condemned 

anyone else. "Everyone lives like that here." 

And hands were also untied by the fact that there was no 

meaning, no purpose, left in life. 

Those who did not give in right off . . . either changed their 

232 I TH~ GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

minds or· else were compelled to anyway. And even the most 

stubborn of all, if she was good-looking, would give in, give in 

and go to bed under duress: give in! 

In our minicamp at the Kaluga Gates in Moscow there. was 

a proud wench, M., a former lieutenant and a sniper. She was 

like a princess in a fairy tale: crimson lips, the bearing of a swan, 

jet-black locks.! And the fat, dirty old stock clerk, Isaak 

Bershader, decided to buy her. He was nauseati!lg in appearance 

-and to her, in view of her own resilient beauty, her own 

recent heroic life, he was particularly repulsive. He was a rotten 

snag and she was a tall beautiful poplar. But he besieged her so 

persistently and hard she could hardly breathe. He not only condemned 

her to general work. (All the trusties acted in concert 

and helped him in his entrapment.) She was subjected to harassment 

by the jirilers. (He also had the j!lPers on his hook.) And 

he even threatened her with an assuredly bad prisoner transport 

to far away. And one evening, when the lights had gone out in 

the camp, I myself saw how, in a twilight pale because of snow 

and sky, M. went like a shadow from the women's barracks and 

knocked with bent head at this .greedy Bershader's storeroom. 

After that she was well taken care of inside the camp compound ... 

M.N., who was already middle-aged, and a draftsman out in 

freedom, the mother of two children, who had lost her· husband 

in prison, had already gone far along the path of a last-legger 

iii. the women's logging brigad~d still kept on bCing stubborn, 

and was close to the point of no return. Her legs swelled 

up. She stumbled back from work at the t8il end of the column, 

and the convoy would drive her along with blows of their gunstocks. 

One day she somehow stayed behind in the compound. 

The cook played up to her: Come on over to my cabin. I will feed 

you a bellyful. She went. lie put a big frying pan offried potatoes 

and pork in front of her. She ate it all up. But after she had paid 

for it she threw up-and the potatoes. were all lost. The cook 

swore at her: "Just think! What a princess!" And from then on 

she got used to it gradually. She got in a better position. And 

later, sitting at a camp film showing, she would pick out a man 

for the night. 

And_ anyone who went on waiting longer . . . would have. 

to drag herself to the men's common barracks on her own-not 

2. In my play. I portrayed her under the name Granya Zybina, but there 

I endowed her with a better fate than the ODe she actually had.


to the trusties by this time--and walk down the aisles between 'the 

bunks repeating moho~onously, "Half a kilo, half a kilo." And if 

a rescuer would go with her for a bread ration, then she would 

curtain off her bunk with sheets on three sides and in this tent, 

this shack (hence "shack-up"), earn her bread. If the jailer didn't 

catch her firkt. 

A multiple bunk curtained off with rags from the neignboring 

women was a classic camp scene. But things could be a great deal 

simpler than that too. This again refers to the ,Krivoshchekovo 

Camp No.1, 1947-1949. (We know of this No.1, but how 

many were there?) At this camp there were thieves, nonpolitical 

offenders, juveniles, invalids, women and nursing mothers, all 

mixed up together. There was just one women's barracks-but 

it held five hundred people. It was indescribably filthy, incomparably 

,filthy_ and rundown, and there was an oppressive smell 

in it and the bunks were without bedding. There was an official 

prohibition against men entering it, but this prohibition was 

ignored and no one enforced it. Not only men went there, but, 

juveniles too, boys from twelve to thirteen, who flocked in to 

learn. First they began with simple observation of what was 

going on; there was no false modesty there, whether because there 

were no rags or perhaps not enough time; at any rate the bunks 

were not curtained aD. And, of course, the light was never doused 

either. Everything took place very naturally as in nature in full 

view, and in several places at once. Obvious old age and obvious 

ugliness were the only defenses for a woman there--nothing else. 

Attractiveness was a curse. Such a woman had a constant stream 

of visitors on her bl!nk and was constantly surrounded. They 

propositioned her and threatened her with beatings and knivesand 

she.b~d no hope of being able to stand up against it but only 

to be smart about whom she gave in to-to pick the kind of man 

to defend her with his name and his knife from all the rest, from 

the next in line, from the whole greedy queue, from those crazy 

juveniles gone berserk, aroused by everything they could see and 

breathe in there. And it wasn't only men that she had to be defended 

against either. Nor only the juveniles who were aroused. 

What about the women next to them, who day after day had to 

see all that but were not themselves invited by the men? In the end 

those women, too, would explode in an uncontrollable rage and 

hurl themselves on their successful neighbors and beat them up. 

And then, too, venereal diseases were nearly epidemic at 

234 I THB GULAG A~CHIPBLAGO 

Krivoshchekovo. There was a rumor that nearly half· the women 

were infected, but there was no way out, and on and on both the 

sovereigns and the suppliants kept crossing the same threshold. 

And only those who were very foresighted, like the accordionist 

K., who had his own connections in the Medical Section, could 

each time check the secret list of the venereal-disease patients 

for hinIself and his friends in order not to get caught. 

And what about the women in the Kolyma? After all, women 

were extremely rare there and in desperate demand. It wa,s better 

for a woman not to get caught on the work sites there-by a convoy 

guard, a free employee, or a prisoner. The Kolyma was_ where 

the expression streetcar for a gang rape arose. K.O. tells how a 

truck driver lost at cards a whole truckload of women, including 

K.O. herself, being transported to Elgen. And, turning off the- 

road, he del~vered them for the night to a gang of unconvoyed 

construction workers. 

And what about the work? In any mix~ brigade there was 

some kind of indulgence for a woman, some kind of work which 

was a bit easier. But if the entire brigade consisted of womenthen 

there was no mercy shown, then they demanded the same 

cubic yards! And there were camps populated entirely by women, 

.and in such camps the women were }umberjacks, and ditchdiggers, 

and a~obe brickiayers. And it was only to the copper 

and tungsten Inines that women were not assigned. Take Karlag 

"Camp 29"-how many women were there at that point? No 

more, no less ·than six thousand!8 What kind of work did these 

women do? Yelena O. worked as. aloa4.er. She used to haul 

bags weighing 175 to 200 .pounds each! True, she was given 

help in getting them up on her shoulders, yes, and in her youth 

she had been a gymnast too. (Yelena Prokofyevna Chebotaryeva 

worked as a loader throughout her ten-year sentence.) 

At the women's camps the establishedpattem of conduct was 

3. This is relevant to the question of the total number of zeks in the Archipelago. 

Who knew this Camp 29? And was it the last one in Karlag? And bow 

many people were there in each of the remai,ning camps? Anyone with the 

time to spare can multiply it far himself! And -who knew a certain Fifth 

Construction Sector of the Rybinsk hydro project? In fact, there were more 

than· a hundred barracks there and, given even the \east possible crowding, a 

good six thousand were to be found there too. Loshchi\in recollects that there 

were more than "ten thousand.


generally uilfeminine and cruel, incessant cursing, incessant 

fights, misbehavior. Otherwise you'd not sUrvive. (But, as the unconvoyed 

engineer Prokhorov-Pustover reports: women taken 

from a women's unit such as that and assigned as servants or to 

'decent work immediately changed into quiet and hard-working 

women. He had occasion to observe such units in the thirties, 

on the Baikal-Amur Main Line working on second-tracking the 

Trans-Siberian Railroad. Here is a picture: On a hot day three 

hundred wo.men asked the convoy to permit them to bathe in a 

flooded ravine. The cbnvoy refused permission. At that point 

the women undressed to their bare skins and lay down to sun 

themselves-right along the railroad track in sight of all the 

passing trains. While local trains carrying Soviet citizens were 

• passing by, this was no disaster, but they were expecting the 

lnternational express, in which there were foreigners. The women 

refused to obey orders to put their clothes on. So then the 

authorities summoned the local fire department and frightened 

them off with hoses.) 

Here is what women's work was like in Krlvoshchekovo. At 

the brickyard, when they had completed working one section of 

the clay pit, they used to take down the overhead shelter (before 

. they had mined there, it had been laid out on the surface of the 

earth). And now it was necessary to hoist wet beams ten to twelve 

yards up out of a big pit. How was it done? The reader will say~ 

with machines. Of course: A women's brigade looped a cable 

around each end of a beam, and in two rows like barge haulers, 

keeping even so as not to let the beam drop and then .have to begin 

over again, pulled one side of each cable and .. ". out came 

the beam. And then a score of them would hoist up one beam 

on their showders to the accompaniment .of command oaths 

from their out-and-out slave driver of a woman brigadier and 

would carry the beam to its new place and dump it there. A 

tractor, did you say? But, for pity's sakes, where would you get 

a tractor in 1948? A crane, you saytl But you have forgotten 

Vyshinsky: ''work, the miracle worker which transforms people 

from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes"? H there were 

a crane . ~ . thea what about the miracle worker? H there were a 

" crane . . . then these women would simply wallow in insignificancel 

. 

. The bOdy becomes worn out at that kind of work, and every- 


thing that is feminine in a woman, whether it be constant or 

whether it be monthly, ceases to be. If she manages to last to the 

next "commissioning," the person who undresses before the physicians 

will be not at all like the one whom the trusties smacked 

their lips over in the bath corridor: she has become ageless; her 

shoUlders stick out at sharp angles, her breasts hang down in little 

dried-out sacs; superfluous folds of skin form wrinkles on her 

flat 'buttocks; there is so little flesh above her knees that a ,big 

enough gap has opened up for .. a sheep's head to. stick through 

or even a soccer ball; her voic~ has become hoarse and rough 

and her face is tan~ed by pellagra. (And, as a gynecologist will 

tell you, several months of logging will sufic~ for the prolapse 

and falling out of a more important organ.)- 

Work-the miracle worker! 

Nothing is ever equal, by and large, in life, and this is all the 

more true in camp. And not everyone had the same hopeless 

fate at work. And the younger they were sometimes, the easier 

things were for them. I can just see the sturdy nineteen-year-old 

Napolnaya, her peasant cheeks ruddy allover. In the minicamp 

at the Kaluga Gates she was crane operator on the turret crane. 

She used to climb up like a monkey to her seat in the crane, and 

sometimes she would crawl out on its swinging arm without any 

need to, and shout to the whole construction yard "Hi-ho!" And 

from the cabin she would shout back and forth with the free 

construction superintendent, with the'foremen-she .had no tele-. 

phone: Everything was amusing to ,her, gay, as if she weren't in 

camp: Go join the KOInsomol. She smiled at everyone with some 

-sort of good nature untypical of camp. She always was given 140 

percent-the highest ration in camp. And no enemy was fearsome 

to her (well, other than the godfather). H~r construction 

superintendent would not have allowed anyone to offend her. The 

only thing I don't know was how she managed to learn to be a 

crane operator. Did she get into that work without some selfinterest 

somewhere? She was in for one of the inoffensive nonpolitical 

articles. Strength blazed out all over her. And the position 

she had won for herself permitted her to give her love not 

out of need but from her own heart's desire. 

Sacbkova, who waS imprisoned at nineteen, descri1:les her own 

position in the same light. She got into an agricultural penal 

colony, where, incidentally, there is always more to eat and where


things are therefore easier. "I used to run from reaping machine 

to reaping machine with a song on my lips, and learned to tie up 

sheaves." If one has no other youth but youth In camp then ... 

one has to be gay there too, where else? And then she was taken 

to the tundra near Norilsk, and Norilsk, too, "seemed like some 

sort of fairy-tale city I had dreamed about in childhood." Having 

served out her term, she stayed there as a free employee. "I 

remember I was walking in a blizzard, and all of a sudden I was 

seiZed by a mood of exaltation and I walked along, waving my 

arms, fighting with the blizzard, singing the song 'The Heart Is 

Joyful from a Gay Song;' I looked at the iridescent curtain of the . 

northern lights, threw myself down on the snow, and looked 

up into the sky. I wanted to sing so loudly that Norilsk COuld 

hear me: that it was not the five years that had conquered me but 

I them, that all those barbed wires and sleeping s~elves and convoys 

had come to an end. I w~ted to love! I wanted to do 

something for people so there would be no more evil in the 

world." 

. Well, yes, many others wanted that too. 

Sachkova, nonetheless, did not manage to free us from evil:· 

the camps still stand. But she herself had good luck:. after all, 

not five years but five. weeks are enough to destroy both· the 

woman and the human being. 

And only these two cases contrast in my- investigatin with 

thousands that were joyless or unconscionable. 

But, of course, where else but in camp would you experience 

your first love if they had imprisoned you for fifteen years (on 

a political charge) as an eighth-grader, like Nina Peregud? How 

could you fail to fall in love with the handsome jazz musician 

Vasily Kozmin, who not long before, out in freedom, had 

been adored by the, whole city, and in his aura of fame and 

glory ~ad seemed unattainable? And Nina wrote her verses "A 

Twig of White Lilac," and he set them to music and sang them 

to her over the perimeter barrier separating the compounds. 

(They had already separated them, and again he was unattainable.) 

. 

The girls of the Krivoshchekovo barracks also pinned flowers 

in their. hair-a sign they had ... a camp marriage, but also, 

perhaps ... that they were in love? 

External legislation (for outside Gulag) seemingly abetted 


camp love. An All-Union Decree of July 8, 1944, on the 

strengthening of ~ariage ties was accompanied by· an unpublished 

decree of the Council of People's Commissars and an 

instruction of the People's Commissariat of Justice dated 

November 27, 1944, in which it was stated that the court waS 

required to dissolve unconditionally a marriage with a spouse in 

prison (or in an insane asylum) ·at the first indication of desire 

on the part of a free Soviet person, and even to encourage this by 

freeing such a person from the fee for issuance of a divorce decree. 

(And .at the same time no one was obliged legally to inform 

the other spouse of the accomplished divorce!) By this token, 

citizenesseS and citizens were called· on to abandon their imprisoned 

wives and husbands all the more speedily in Inisfortune. 

And prisoners were correspondingly invited . . . to forget about 

their marriages ,all the more thoroughly. Now it became not only 

silty and nonsocialist but als. illicit for a woman to languish 

for a husband from whom she had been separated if he remained 

out in freedom. Zoya Yakusheva was imprisoned as a ChS---: 

Family Member-because of her husband, and here's how it 

went with her. After three. years, he~ husband was liberated as 

. an important specialist, but he did not make his wife's release an 

obligatory condition of his own. And she had to drag out her 

eight full years because of him. .. 

Yes, the zeks were to forget about their marriages, but Gulag 

instructions also forbade indulgence in love affairs as a diversionary 

action against the production plan. After all, these unscrupulous 

women who wandered about the work sites, forgetting 

their obligations to the state and the Archipelago, were ready 

to lie down on their 1?acks anywhere at all-on the damp ground, 

on wood chips, on road stone, on slag, on iron shavings-and 

, the plan would collapse! And the Five-Year Plan would mark 

time! And there would be no prize money for the Gulag chiefs! 

And besides some of those zechkas secretly nurtured a desire to 

get pregnant and, on the strength of this pregnancy, exploiting 

the humanitarianism of our laws, to snatch several months off 

their terms, which were often a short three or five years anyway, 

and not work at all those months. That was why Gulag instructions 

required that any prisoners caught cohabiting should be. 

immediately separated, and that the less useful of the two 

should be sent off on a prisoner transport. (Now this, of course, .

Women in .Camp I 239 

had nothing in common with those cruel Saltychikhas in serf 

times who used to send girl serfs off to distant villages.) 

All that lyrical love beneath pea jacke~ was also vexatious for 

the custodial staff. At nights when the citizen jailer might otherwise 

have snored away in his duty room, he had to go about with 

a tIashlight and catch all those brazen naked-legged women in 

bunks in the men's barracks and those men over in the women's 

barracks. Not to mention his own possible. lusts (for, after all, 

the citizen jailer was not made of stone either), he had furthermore 

the labor of hauling the offender off to the punishment 

block or perhaps spending the whole long night remonstrating 

with her, explaining to her in what way her conduct had been 

improper, and then writi~g a complete report on the subject 

(which, given lack of higher education, was even a torment). 

Plundered of everything that fulfills female life and indeed 

human life in general-of family, motherhood, the company of 

friends, familiar and perhaps even interesting work, in some cases 

perhaps in art or among books, and crushed by fear, hunger, 

,tnemno~naba and savagery-what else could the women camp 

inmates tum to except love? With God's blessing the love which 

came might also be almost not of the flesh, because to do it in the 

bushes was shameful, to do -it in the barracks in everyone's 

presence was impossible, and the man was not always up to· it, 

and then the jailers would drag the culprits out· of every hideout 

(seclusion) and put them in the pQnishment block. But from its 

unfleshly character, as the women remember today, the spirituality 

of camp love became even more pr6tound. And it was particularly 

because of the absence of the flesh that this love became more 

poignant than out in freedom! Women who were already elderly 

could not sleep nights because of a chance smile, because of 

some fleeting mark of attention they had received. So sharply 

did the light of love stand out against the dirty, murky camp 

existence! 

N. Stolyarova saw the "conspiracy of happiness" on the face of 

her girl friend, a Moscow actress, and on that of the latter's 

illiterate pllrtner at hay-hauling, Osman. The aclress -revealed 

that no one had -ever loved her that way· before--neither her 

film-director husba.nd nor all her former admirers. And only 

because of this did she decline to be taken off hay-hauling, from 

the general w~k. 


Then there was the risk-almost like war, almost fatal: as 

punishment for one discovered rendezvous, you might be sent 

away from a place grown habitable--in other words, pay with 

your life. Love on the knife edge of danger, where personalities 

deepen so and unfold, where every inch is paid for with sacrifices 

-that is heroic love! (In Ortau, Anya Lekhtonen stopped loving-fell 

out of love with-'-her sweetheart in the course of those 

twenty minutes when the guard was leading them to the punishment 

block and her sweetheart was humiliatingly begging the 

guard to let him go.) Some became the kept women of trusties 

without love----'in order to save themselves, and others went· on 

general work-and perished-for love. 

And women who were not at all young turned out to be 

involved in this too, even placing the jailers in a quandary: out in 

freedom no one would ever have considered such a woman! 

And these women did not seek passion, but to satisfy their need 

to look after someone, to keep him warm, to sacrifice their own 

rations in order to feed him up,to wash and dam for him. The 

common bowl out of which they ate was their sacred wedding 

ring. "I do not need to sleep with him, but in our beastly life, in 

which we curse each other in the barracks the whole day long 

over the bread ration and over rags, I keep thinking to myself: 

Today I must mend his shirt, and boil his potatoes," one woman 

explained to Dr. Zubov. But the man at times wanted more, and 

it was necessary to yield, and right then the supervisors would 

catch them. . . ~ And that was how, in Unzhlag, the hospital 

laundress Auntie Polya, who had ~en widowed very early, who 

had subsequently been alone all her life, and who had later 

helped out in a church, was,caught at night with a man at the 

very tail end of her camp term. "How did that happen, Auntie 

Polya?" The doctors were astonished. "We were counting on 

you. And now they are going to send you out to general work." 

"Yes, I'm to blame," the old woman nodded, crushed. "In the 

Gospel sense I'm a sinner, and in the camp sense a ---." 

But in the punishment of lovers who had been caught, as in 

the entire structure of Gulag, there was no fairness. If one of the 

pair was a trusty, close to the chiefs, or very much needed at 

work, then they might for years look through their fingers at 

this liaison. (When an unconvoyed electrical repairman appeared 

at the Women's· Hospital Camp of Unzhlag, all the free em-


ployees were interested in his services, and the chief doctor, a 

free woman, summoned the nurse housekeeper, a zechka, and 

gave instructions: "Create suitable conditions for Musa Butenko." 

Musa was the nurse because of whom the repairman had come.) 

But if the zeks involved were insignificant or in disfavor, they 

were punished swiftly and cruelly. 

In'Mongolia, in the GULZhDS Camp (our zeks built a railroad 

there from 1947 to 1950), two unconvoyed girls were 

caught running to see friends in the men's column. The guard tied 

them behind his horse and, mounting the horse, dragged them 

across the steppe.' None of your serf-owning Saltychikhas did 

that! But they used to do it at Solovki. 

Eternally persecuted, exposed, and separated, these native 

couples could not, it WGuid seem, be Icing-lasting or stable. At the 

same time, however, cases are known in which they managed to 

keep up a corespo~dence and got together again after their release. 

One such case is known, for example: One· doctor, B.Y.S., 

an assistant professor at a provincial medical institute, lost count 

of his liaisons in camp-he had not let even one nurse get by, and 

there were others too! But in this long line he encountered Z., and .... 

the line stopped. Z. did not cut short her pregnancy and gave birth 

to a child. B.S. was released shortly afterward and, having no 

limitations on him, could have gone to his own native city. But 

he remained in the camp as a free employee so as to be near Z. 

~(Da the child. His own wife, losing patienCe, came to him there. 

At this point he hid from her inside the camp compoun4. (Where, 

of course, his wife could not get to him!) He lived there with Z. 

and communicated to his wife by every possible means that he> 

had divorced her and that she should go away. 

But it was. nof only the custodial staff and camp chiefs who " 

would break up camp marriages. The Archipelago was such an 

upside-down land that in it a man and Ii woman could be split 

up by what ought to have united them even more firmly: the 

birth of a child. A month before giving birth a pregnant woman 

was transported to !lllother ~amp, w_here there was a camp 

4. Who today will seek out his name? And him? Yes, and if one were 

even to speak to him about it, he would be astonished: What's he guilty of? 

. He was·ordered to do it! So why did they have to go to the men anyway, the 

bitches? 

'-- 


hospital with a maternity ward and where husky little voices 

shouted that they did not want to be zeks because of the sins of· 

their parents. After giving birth the mother was sent to a special 

nearby camp for mamki-nursing mothers. 

d~ right here we have to interrupt! Right here it is impossible· 

not to interrupt! How much self-ridicule there is in this world! "We 

are ... not the real thing!" The zek language dearly loves and 

makes stubborn use of all these disparaging diminutive Russian 

suffixes: not "mat"-mother-but mamka; not. "bolnitsa" 

hospital-but bolnichka; not "svidaniye"-a rendezvous-but 

svidanka; not "pomilovaniye"-pardon-but pomilovka; not 

"volny"-a free person-but volnyashka; not "zhenitsa"-to 

marry a woman-but podzhenitsa-to "submarry," this being the 

same derisiveness even though not in. the suffix. And even 

clietvertnaya (a twenty-five-year t~rm) is demoted to chetvertaka 

-from twenty-five rubles to twenty-five kopecks! 

By this insistent bias of the language, the zeks demonstrate 

also that nothing in the Archipe!ago is genuine, everything is a 

forgery, everything is of the lowest grade. And that they themselves 

do not set any value on the things ordinary people value. 

They show awarep.ess of the fake nature of the me


on norms for free children, and therefore the medical and housekeeping 

personnel around them get well fed too. ) Some children 

cannot adjust to artificial feeding without their mothers and die. 

The survivors are sent after a year to a general orphanage. And 

thus it is that the son of two natives may depart from the 

Archipelago for the time being, though not without hope of 

returning as a juvenile offender. 

Those who kept track of this > said it was infrequent for a 

mother to take her child from an orphanage after release (and 

the women thieves ... never did). So that many of these children 

who had bn'J\th~d in the infected air of the Arcbipelago with 

the first breath of their tiny lungs were thUs damned from the 

start. Others ... did take them or, even before their own release, 

sent some ignorant old women for' them (perhaps religious 

women). And despite the harm thereby done the goveinmenfs 

upbringing and the irreparable loss to Gulag of funds allotted for 

the maternity home, for the mother's maternity leave,and for 

maintenance of the infants' home, Gulag released these children. 

During all those years, prewar and war, when pregnancy 

separated camp spous,es and broke up those hard-won, doggedly 

concealed, constantly' threatened and in any case frag'Je unions 

... women tried not to have children. And again the Archipelago 

was not like freedom: in the years when abortions were prohibited 

and prosecuted out in freedom, and were very difficult to obtain 

. . . the camp chiefs here took an indulgent attitude. toward 

abortions, which were often carried out in hospitals: after all, it 

was best for the camp. . 

And these issues of whet11er to give birth or not, which were 

difficult enough for any woman at all, were still more confused for 

a woman camp inmate. And what would happen to the child 

subsequently? And if such a fickle camp fate gave one the chance 

to become pregnant by one's loved one, then how ceuld one go 

ahead and have an abortion? Should you have the child? That 

meant certain separation immediately, and when you left would 

he not pair off with some other woman in the same camp? And . 

what kind of child would it be? (Because of the malnutrition 

of the parents it was often defective.) And when you stopped 

nursing the "hild and were sent away (you still had many years 

left to serve), would they keep an eye out ~o as not to do him 

in? And would you be able to take the child into your own 

244 I THB GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

34. The Glebovs 

family? (For some this was excluded.) And if you didn't take 

him, would your conscience then torment you all your life? 

(For some-not at all.) . 

Those who counted on being uiuted with the father of their 

child after release went into motherhood in camp with selfassurance 

and confidence. (And sometimes these expectations 

worked out. Here is A. Glebov with his camp wife twenty years 

afterward: with them is their daugliter born back in Unzhlag. 

who is now nineteen; 'what a lovely girl she is too; and another 

daughter, born out in freedom ten years later, when 'the parents 

had served out their terms. [lliustration No. 34.]) There were 

those who went into it who passionately desired to experience 

motherhood-in Caplp. since that was the only life they had. 

After all, this is aliving thing sucking at your breast-not fake or 

ersatz, and not second-grade either. (The Harbin girl Lyalya 

had a second child only in order to be able to return to the 

children's village and see her· first there! And then she .had a 

third so as to return to see the first two. And having served 

out her five-year sentence she managed to keep all three of them 

and was released with them.) Irreparably humiliated, the camp 

women were reconfirmed in their human dignity through mother-


hood and for a short time felt as th@gh they had attained equality 

with free women. Or else: "So I am a prisoner, but my child is 

free!" And they jealously demanded maintenance and care for 

tbe child on the same level as for a genuinely free child. Others, 

usually from among the veteran camp women and the thieves, 

looked upon motherhood as a year of loafing, some~es as a way 

of early release. They did not even consider their own child to 

be their own, and did not even want to see it, II,nd did not even 

try to find out whether it was alive. 

The mothers from the 1Ilkhidnitsy-Westem Ukrainiansand 

sometimes fro~ among the Russians too--the more simple 

folk in origin-sought persistently to have their children christened. 

(This-was in the postwar years.) The crucifix was either 

sent carefully hidden in a parcel (the jailers would never have 

permitted such counterrevolution to get through) or else was 

ordered from some clever fellow in camp in return for bread. 

They also used to get a ribbon for the cross, and managed to make 

a fancy baby's vest, and a cap. By saving up sugar from their 

ration they managed to bake a tiny christening cake out of something 

or other-and their closest women friends were invited. 

There was always a woman who could pronounce a prayer-any 

prayer would do--and the child was dipped in warm water and 

baptized, and the glowing mother invited everyone to the table. 

For "mamki" with nursing children (though not, of course, 

for the 58's among them) special amnesties were sometimes 

issued, or else simply orders· for release ahead of. term. 

Those most often affected by these orders were habitual 

criminals involved in lesller crimes and women thieves-and they 

were the ones who had, in fact, been partly counting on these 

benefits. And just as soon as these "mamki" had received their 

passport and their railway ticket in the nearest provincial center, 

they often left their child, who w~ no longer needed, right 

there on the station bench or on the first porch they came to. 

(But one does have to realize that not all of them could expect 

to find housing, or a sympathetic greeting from the police, or passport 

registration, or work, and there would not be a camp ration 

ready and waiting for them t~e next momipg either. It was 

easier to begin to live without the child.) 

In 1954 at the Tashkent Station I happened to be spending the 

night not far from a group of zeks who were on their way from 

camp and who had been ~leased on the basis of some special 


order. There were about three dozen of them, and they took up 

a whole corner of the hall, behaving very noj.sily, with a semiunderworld 

insolence, like genuine childr!!n of Gulag, knowing 

what life was worth and holding in contempt all the free people 

there. The men played cards and the "mamki" argued loudly 

about something. And all of a sudden one mother screamed 

something more· shrilly than the rest, jumped up, swung her 

child by the legs and audibly banged his head on the cement 

floor. The hallful of free people gasped: A mother! How could a 

mother do that! 

... They just didn't understand that it was not a motherbut 

a mamka . 

• 

Everything said so far refers to joint, coeducational, camps, such 

as existed from the first years of the Revolution .right up to the 

end of World War II. In those years in the Russian Republic there 

was only the Novinsky House of Detention (converted from a 

former Moscow women's prison) where women only were imprisoned. 

This experiment did not spread, and did not even last 

very long itself. . . 

But having risen, safe and sound, from beneath the ruins of the 

war, which he had nearly lost, the Teacher and Founder took 

thought as to the welfare of his subjects. His thoughts were now 

freed to look to the ordering of their lives, and much that he 

devised at this time was useful, much was moral, and, among 

other things, the male sex and the female sex were separatedfirst 

in schools and camps. (And then, perhaps, he hoped to exc 

tend this t9 all freedom as well-and in China there was such an 

experiment, even more extensiye.) 

And in 1946 the great and.: complete separation of women from 

men began in the Archipelago, and in 1948 it was completed. 

They sent them to different islands, and within anyone island 

they stretched that well-tried friepd, barbed wire, between 

the women's and the men's camp compounds. 5 

But like many other scientifically forecast and scientifically 

5. Many of the initiatives of the great Coryphaeus have by now been admitted 

to be not altogether so perfect, and many of them have been abolished. 

But the separation of the sexes in the Archipelago has remained hard and fast 

right to this very day. For here the basiS is a profoundly moral one.


thought-out actions, this measure, too, had unexpected consequences 

which were the exact opposite of those intended. 

With the separation of women from men, the women's general 

situation at work worsened sharply. Previously, at mixed camps 

many women had -worked as laundresses; hospital attendants, 

cooks and kitchen attendants, stOl:eroom attendants and accountantS. 

And now they had to yield all these positiQns, and 

there were far fewer of them in the women's camps. And the 

women were driven out to general work, driven into brigades 

exclusively of women, where things were particularly hard for 

them. To get oft' general work for at least a while became a 

question of life and death. And the women began to pursue 

pregnancy, trying to catch it from any passing encounter, any 

contact. Pregnancy did not,' as before, carry the threat of being 

parted from a spouse-all partings had already been bestowed in 

one single Wise Decree. 

And now the number of children who entered the infants' 

homes doubled in one year! (Unzhlag, 1948: three hundred 

cqmpared witIl one hundred and fifty.) Even though the number 

of imprisoned women did not increase during this period. 

"What are you going to call the-little girl?" "Olympiada. I got 

pregnant at the Olympiad of amateur stage performances." Out 

of inertia such forms of cultural activity were retained: Olympiads, 

visits by male cultural brigades to women's camps, joint 

rallies of shock workers. Common hospitals were likewise retained-and 

they, too, became houses of assignation. They say 

that in Solikamsk Camp in 1946 the wires separating the men 

. from the women were few in number and strung on one set of 

posts (and, of course, 110 armed guard there). And the insatiable 

natives thronged to this wire from both sides, with the women in 

the position they would have. been in had they been washing 

floors, and the men took them without crossing the forbidden line . 

. After all, immortal Eros is worth something! It was not just a 

reasoned calculation for getting out of general work. The zeks 

sensed that this line was being drawn there for a long time to 

conie and that it would, like everything else in Gulag, only 

harden, become more rigid. . . 

If before the separation of the sexes there was amicable 

cohabitation, camp marriage, even love, now it had become 

merely plain lechery. 

248 \' THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Of course, the chief& were not dozing, and corrected their 

scientific 'predictions as they werit along. To the one row of 

barbed wire they added forbidden zones on either side. And then, 

, recognizing these barriers to be insufficient, they replaced them 

with a six-foot-high fence--also with prohibited zones on either 

side. 

, In Kengir even that barrier did not help; the intending lovers 

leaped over it. Then on Sundays (for'it was impossible to'spend 

workdays on this! Yes, and it was natural that people should 

occupy themselves with their living arang~ents on their days 

off) they began to hand out special Sunday jobs on either side 

of the barricade, and compelled them to raise the height of the 

wall to twelve feet. And here's ,what's funny: the zeks really went 

out to those Sunday work assignments gaily! Before their final 

farewells they might at least make someone's acquaintance on 

the other side of the wall, chat a bit, arrange to correspond! • 

Later in Kengir ,they increased the height of the dividing wall 

to fifteen feet, and stretched barbed wire, too, along the top. And 

then they added a high-voltage wire as well. (How strong that 

cursed Cupid is!) And in addition to everything else they put 

watchtowers at both ends as well. This Kengir wall had its own 

special destiny in the history of the whole Archipelago (see Part 

V, Chapter 12). But they built others like it, too, in other Special 

Camps (for example, jn Spassk). 

One has, to picture to oneself the well-reasoned method~logy 

of these employers who thought it entirely natural to divide the 

slave men from the slave women with barbed wire but would have 

been astonished if anyone had proposed that the same be done 

to themselves and their families. 

The walls grew-and Eros dashed back and forth. Finding no 

other sphere, he either flew too high-'-into platonic correspondence--or 

else too low-into homosexual love. 

Notes were thrown' over the fence, or else left at the factory in 

prearranged hiding places. The addresses on the notes were 

coded, so the jailer, if he found them, couldn't work out who was 

\1{!iting whom. (By now, the punishment for notes was the camp 

prison.) 

Galya Venediktova recalls that sometimes people even made 

one another's acquaintance blindly, corresponde4 without seeing 

each other, and said farewell to one another blindly too, without

nemo~ in Camp I 249 

seeing each other. (Anyone who has ever conducted such a 

correspondence knows both its desperate sweetness and its hopelessness 

and blindness.) In that very same Kengir, Lithuanian 

women were ma"ied across the wall to Lithuanian men whom 

they had never seen or met; and the Lithuanian Roman Catholic 

priest (also, of course, a" prisoner in the standard pea 'jacket) 

would provide written documentation that so-and-so and "l!o-andso 

had been joined for eternity in holy matrimony iIi the eyes of 

God. In this marriage with an unknown prisoner on the other 

side of a wall-and for Roman Catholic women such a marriage 

was irreversible and sacred-I hear a chorr of angels. It is like 

the unselfish, pure contemplation of the heavenly bodies. It is 

too lofty for this age of self-interested calculation and hoppingup-and-down 

jazz. 

The Kengir marriages also had an unexpected outcome. The 

heavens heard the prayers and intervened. (Part V, Chapter 17.) 

And the women themselves and the- doctors who treated them 

in the divided compounds confirm that the women suffered worse 

than the men from the separation. They were particularly excited 

and nervous. Lesbian love developed swiftly. The gentle and the' 

young went about looking sallow, with dark circles under their 

eyes. The"women of a cruder type became the "men." No matter 

how the jailers tried to break up such pairs they turned up again 

in the same bunks. They sent one or the other of these "spouses" 

away from the"camp. Stormy dramas burst out, with people leaping 

onto the barbed wire under fire from the sentries. 

In the Karaganda" division of Steplag, where women solely from 

Article 58 were assembled, many of them, N.V. recounts, awaited 

a summons to the security chief with palpitations--:-not with 

fear or hatred for thai loathsome political interrogation, but with 

heart palpitating because this man would lock you up alone in 

the room with him. 

The separate women's camps bore the same full burden of 

general work. True, in 1951, logging by women was formally 

forbidden-hardly because it was the beginning of the second 

half of the twentieth century. But in Unzhlag, for example, the 

men's camps could not fulfill the plans at all. And then-a method 

was devised t9 spur ~em on-to compel the natives to pay with 

their own work for what is provided withaut payment to every 

living thing in the whole wide world. They began to drive the 

250 I THE GULAG AR_CHIPELAGO 

women. out to logging too, in a single convoy cordon with the 

men, with only a ski track separating them. All the timber cut 

here was subsequently to be registered as the output of the 

men's camp, but the norm was dema:nded frO[!l both men and 

women. Here is what a chief with two stripes on his shoulder 

boards said to Lyuba Beryozina. the "timber foreman": "If you 

and your broads fulfill the norm, Belenky will be in your cabin!" 

But now boPt the strongest men sloggers, and especially the 

work trusties who had money, shoved it at the convoy guards 

(who couldn't exactly go out on.the town on their wages either), 

and for an hour and a half (until the bribed guard changed) they 

rushed across into the women's cordon.' 

• 

In the space of this hour and a half in the snowy frigid woods, 

a man had to pick one out, get acquainted with her (if they hadn't 

corresponded before ), find a place, and do it. 

But why rake up 'aII that past? Why reopen the old wounds of 

those who were -living in Moscow and in country houses at the 

tiMe, writing for the newspapers, speaking frOID rostrums, going 

off to resorts and· abroad? 

Why recall all that when it is still the same even today? After 

all, you can only write about whatever "will not be repeated."


Chapter 9 

:.: 

• 

The Trusties 

One of the first native CQnceptsa newcomer coming to a camp 

learns is that of the trusty;· That-is what the natives rudely ~ed 

everyone who managed. not to share the common, foredoomed 

lot-:-who either got out of general work or never ever got into it. 

'there was no lack of trusties in the Archipelago. Limited in .. 

the living zone to a strict percentage of registration Group "B," 

and at work by staff tables, they nonetheless always managed to 

surge over that percentage-partly because of the pressure from 

those desiring to save their skins, partly because of the ineptitude. , 

of the camp bosses, who were incapable of managing and admingniret~ 

with a small staff. 

According to 1933 statistics of the People's Commissariat of 

Justice,the personnel at places of detention, including economic 

managers and, it's true, trusty guards; constituted 22 percent of 

the total number' of natives. If we reduce this figure to 17 or 18 

percent' (taking out the trusty guards), this still amounts to onesixth. 

So it is already clear that we are speaking in .this chapter 

of a very significant camp phenomenoo. But the total percentage 

of trusties was much higher than one-sixth; after all, these were 

only the compound trusties, and in addition there were all the 

work' trusties. And then there was also a turnover among the 

tfUStiies, and many more prisoners at' one time or another during 

their camp career were apparently trusties for 'a time. And the 

BUJin thing was that among those who survived, those released, 

die trusties constituted a very high proportion-I would say ninetenths 

of the long-termers from the 58's. 

Almost every long-term zek you congratulate on having survived 

was a trusty. Or had been one for a large part of his term. 

Because the camps were destructive, and this must not be 

forgotten. 

All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all 

transitions are gradual. So it is here: the edges are blurred. By 

and large, everyone who did not leave the camp compound during 

, the working day could be considered a compound trusty. A 

worker in the camp workshops lived much more easily and better 

than the slogger on general work: he did not have to go out for 

line-up, and this meant he could rise and 'breakfast much later; 

he did not have to match under convoy to the work site and back; 

there were fewer severities, less cold, less strength spent; also his 

workday ended earIi~r; either his work was in a warm plilce or 

else a place to warm up was always handy. And he usually worked 

not in a brigade, but as an individual craftsman, which meant he 

did not have to put up with nagging from his comrades but only 

from the chiefs. And since he was often enough engaged in making 

something on personal orders of those same chiefs, instead 

of being nagge4 at, he even got handouts, favors, and permission 

to have first call on clothes and footwear. He had a good chance 

of earning something on 'orders from other zeks too. To make 

things more clear: the "khozdvor" was like the working part of 

an establisIiment of servants in ,the manor of a serf-owner. If 

within this category a lathe operator, a carpenter, a stovemaker, ' 

was not yet a full-fledged trusty, a shoemaker, however, and a 

tailor even more so, was already a high-class trusty. ''Tailor'' in 

camp sounds and means something like "¥sistant Professor" out 

in freedom. (And the reyerse side is that in camp the genuine, 

title "Assistant Professor" sounds derisive, and it is best not to 

call yourself that and become a laughingstock. The camp scale of . 

the significance of professions is quite the reverse of the scale out 

in freedom.) , 

A laundress, a hospital attendant, a dishwasher, a, stoker, bath 

workers, a cook's helper, simple bakers, and barracks orderlies 

were also trusties, but of a lower class. They had to work with 

their hands, and sometimes hard. AIl, however, were well fed. 

The genuine compound trusties were: cooks, bt:ead cutters, 

stock clerks, doctors, medical assistants, barbers, instructors of 

the Cultural and Educational SeCtion, bath managers, bakery 

251

The Tru~ties I 253 

managers,- storeroom managers, parcel room managers, senior 

barracks orderlies, superintendents of quarters, work assigners, 

accountants, clerks of the -headquarters barracks, engineers of the 

camp compound and of the camp workshops. Not only were they 

all well fed, chid in clean clothes, and exempt from lifting heavy 

weights and from crooks in their backs, but they had great power 

over what was most needed by a human being, and consequently 

power over people. Sometimes they fought, group against group, 

conducted intrigues, overthrew each other, or raised each other 

up, or quarreled over "broads," but more often they lived in a 

state of joint mutual defense against the rabble, as a satisfied 

establishment, which had no reason to divvy .things up with others 

since everything had long since been divvied up once and for all, 

and each had his own sphere. And the stronger this clique of 

compound trusties was, the more the camp chief depended on it, 

sparing himself worry. The fates of all arriving and sent off on 

prisoner transports, the fates of all the ordinary sloggers, were 

decided by these trusties. 

Because of the human race's customary narrow-minded attachment 

to caste, it very soon became inconvenient for trusties to 

sleep in the same barracks as ordinary sloggers, on the same 

multiple bunks, or even, for that matter, on any multiple bunk 

at ~, 01; anywhere else except a bed, or to eat at the same table, 

to undress in the same bath, or to put on the same underwear in 

which the sloggers had sweated and which they had tom. And so 

the trusties set themselves apart in small rooms with two, four, 

or eight persons in each, and ate there food of their choice, ~upplementing 

it illegally, . discussl!!! all camp appointments and 

business, including the fates of people and of brigades, without 

the risk of running into insults from the sloggers or brigadiers. 

They spent their leisure separately (and they had leisure). They 

had their "individual" bed linen changed on a separate schedule. 

By virtue of the same caste foolishness they tried to be distincth:e 

from the camp masses in clothing too, but these possibilities were 

not great. If in a particular camp black padded jackets or ordinary 

jackets predominated, they would try to get dark blue ones from 

the storeroom, and if dark blue ones predominated, they put on 

black ones. In addition, they got the narrow camp britches broadened 

into bell bottoms in the tailors' shop-through use of triangular 

inserts. 


The work trusties properly speaking consisted of the engineers, 

technicians, construction superintendents, foremen, ~eads of 

shops, plane~, norm setters, and, in addition, accountants, secretaries, 

typists. They differed from the compound trusties fu that 

they had tp go out to line-up and were marched to work in a 

convoyed column (though sometimes they were not convoyed). 

But their situation on the site was privileged-they did not have 

to endure physical torments and were not utterly exhausted. On 

the contrary, the work, the feeding, the life of the sloggers was 

dependent in great degree on them. Even though less connected 

with the camp compound, they tried to defend their positions 

there too and to receive a significant number of the same privileges 

as the compound trusties, though they could never manage to 

catch up with them. 

There were no precise boundaries here either. Also in this category 

were designers, technologists, geodesists, motor mechanics, 

machinery maintenance personnel.. They were by no means 

"commanders of production"; they did not share the fatal power, 

and they had no responsibility for people's deaths (as long as 

these deaths were not· caused by the technology of production 

selected or serviced by them). They were simply intelligent or 

even semieducated sloggers. Like every zek at work, they faked, 

deceived the chiefs, tried to drag out for a week what could be 

done in half a day. Customarily they lived in camp almost like 

sloggers, were often members of work brigades, and only in the 

work compound did they have it warm and peaceful. There, alone 

in their offices and cabins, with no free people about, they would 

drop the subject of government work and gossip about life, about 

prison terms, about the past and the future, and, D)ost of all, about 

rumors that 58's (they themselves were most often recruited 

from the 58's) would soon be sent off to general work. 

And for this there was a profound, uniquely scientific foundation: 

after all, it was virtually impossible to co"ect socially hostile 

prisoners, so rooted were they in their class corruption. The 

majority could be corrected only by the grave. And even if, none 

. theless, a certain minority was indeed capable of being corrected, 

then, of course, it could only be by labor, physical rabor, heavy 

labor (replacing machines), the sort of labor which would have 

been degrading for a camp officer or jailer, but which nonetheless 

once created the human being from the ape (and in camp inex-

The Trusties 

I 2SS 

plicably transforms him back into an ape again). And that is why 

it is not at ~l out of vengeance but only in the faint hope of 

correcting the 58's that it is strictly stated in the Gulag regulations 

(and this regulation is continually being renewed) that persons 

condemned under Article 58 cannot occupy any privileged positions 

either in the camp compound or at work. (The only prisoners 

able to occupy positions having to do with material values 

are ones who out ~ freedom have already· distinguished themselves 

by stealing.) And. that is how it would have been-for, 

after all, the camp chiefs hardly harbored any love for the· 58's. 

But they did know: that there were not even one-fifth as many 

specialists under all the other articles combined all under 58. The 

physicians and engineers. were almost entirely 58's. And you'd 

not find better workers or more straightforwardly honest people 

even among the free employees. And so in covert opposition to 

the: One-and-Only Scientific Theory, the employers began surreptitiously 

assigning 58's to trusty positions. Meanwhile the most 

lucrative ones always remained in the hands of the nonpolitical 

. offenders, with whom the chiefs found it easier. to make dealsand 

too much honesty would have even been a hindrance. So they 

used to put the 58's in trusty positions, bilt with each renewal of 

this regulation (and it kept being renewed), and before the arrival 

of any verification commission (and they kept arriving), a wave 

of the chiefs white hand would send off the 58's to general work 

without hesitation or regrets. Temporary well-being painstakingly 

built up over months was shattered to bits in one fell day. But 

this expulsion was not so ruinous in itself as were the eternal 

rumors .of its approach, which ground down and wore out the 

political trusties. These rumors poisoned the trusty's whole existence. 

Only the nonpolitical offenders could enjoy their trusty 

situation serenely. (However, the commission would come and 

go, the work would quietly fall apart again, and the engineers 

would once again be quietly hauled ii1 to fill trusty positions, only 

to be driven out when the next commission was due.) 

And other than the plain, ordinary 58's, there were also those 

whose prison files had been branded with a separate curse from 

Moscow: ''To be used only on general work!" Many of the 

Kolyma prisoners in 1938 carried this brand. And for them to 

get work: as a laundress or a drier of felt boots was an unattainable 

dream. 


How does the Communist Manifesto go? "The bourgeoisie has 

stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked 

up to with reverent awe.-C-A certain resemblance here!) "It has 

converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man 

of science, into its paid wage laborers."l* Well, at least they 

were paid! And at least they were left to work in their own "field 

of professional specialization"! And what if they had been sent 

out to general work? To logging? And unpaid! And unfed! True, 

physicians were sent out on general work only rarely: aIter all, 

they were called upon to cure the chiefs' families as well. But as 

for lawyers} priests, poets, and men of science-they were only 

fit to rot doing general work. There was no place for them among 

the trusties. 

The brigadiers occupied a special position in the camp. In camp 

terms they were not considered trusties,~ but you couldn't call them 

sloggers either. Therefore the arguments advanced in this chapter 

apply to them as well. . 

• 

Just as in battle, so in camp life there is po time for discussion; 

a position as trusty becomes available-so you grab it. 

But years and decades have passed. We have survived and our 

comrades have perished. To astounded free people and our indifferent 

heirs we are beginning to disclose bit by bit the world 

of then and there, which had almost nothing human in it-and 

we must evaluate it in the light of the human conscience. 

And one of the principal moral questions here concerns the 

trusties. 

In choosing the hero of my story about the camps I chose a 

slogger, and I could not have chosen anyone else, for only he 

could perceive the true interrelationships of camp life. (Just as it 

is only the infantryman who can weigh a whole war in the balance, 

though for some reason it is not he who writes the war memoirs.) 

This choice-of a hero and certain sharp remarks in my story perplexed 

and offen4ed some former trusties-and, as I have already 

said, nine-tenths of the survivors are indeed trusties. Thereupon 

I. Marx and Engels, Sobrannye Sochineniya (Collected Works), 1928 edition, 

Vol. lV, p. 427.

The Trusties I' 257 

''Memoirs of a Trusty," by Dyakov, appeared (Memoirs of Survival),· 

complacently confirming their resourcefulness in getting 

well fixed and cleverness in surviving at any cost. (And this is 

precisely the sort of book that should have appeared before my 

own.) 

In those few short months when it seemed possible to discuss, 

a certain amount of debate flared up about the role of the trusties, 

and a certain g~neral question was raised of the moral pOsition 

'. of the trusty in camp. But in our country they"do not permit any 

information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion 

to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably. 

suppressed at.the very' beginning-so no ray of light showd fall ' 

on the nakes! body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one 

formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole 

decades-until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty 

blocks from all this traSh are lost. And so it was that all discussion 

of the trusties was dampened down at the very beginning, and 

passed out of. the pages of the public press into private letters. 

And the distinction between a trusty and a slogger in camp 

(though no sharper than that which existed in reality) hid to 

be made, and it was very good that it was made right at the very 

birth of the camp theme in literature. But in V. Lakshin's censored 

articleS there was a certain excessiveness of expression on the 

subject of camp labor (seeming to glorify that very thing which 

replaced machines and .created us from the apes), and the generally 

correct direction of the article and to a certain extent my 

own novella as well were met with a counterwave of indignation 

-both from former trusties and from their never-imp~ned 

intellectual friends: What's going on here ... is slave labor being· 

glorified (the cinder-block-laying scene in One Day in the Life of 

Ivan Denisovich)?! What's going on here ... since when does 

"eam your bread by the sweat of your brow" mean do what the 

Gulag chiefs want you to? We trusties are patticularly proud that 

we avoided work and didn't drag out our existence at it. 

In answei:ing these objections right now, I only regret that they 

will not be read for some time. . 

In my opinion, it is unworthy of an intellectual to be proud of 

the fact that he didn't descend to physical slave labor, you see, 

2. Nov, Mir. 1964. No. 1. 


because he was able to get into office work. In this situation the 

Russian intellectuals of the past century would have presumed 

to boast only if, at the same time, they could have liberated their 

younger brother from slave labor as well. After all, Ivan Denisovich 

didn't have that way out-fixing himself up with an office 

job! So what should we do about our younger brother? Is it all 

right to let our younger brother drag ·out his existence at slave 

labor? (Well, why not? After all, we've been letting him do it 

long enough' on the collective farms!. We even fixed him up with 

it there!) But if we let him do Uris, then maybe, at least once in 

a while, for at least an hour or so on occasion, before knocking 

off, when the masonry work has gone well, we can let him tal!:e 

an interest in his work? We, after all, even in camp, find a certain 

enjoyment in sliding the pen along the paper, in drawing a black 

line on tracing paper with a drawing pen. How could Ivan Denisovich 

get through ten years if all he could do was curse his work 

day and night? After all, in that case he would have had to hang 

himself on the first handy hook! 

And what, then, can one say about such an unlikely story as . 

this: Pavel \::hulpenyov, who had worked at logging for seven 

years in a row (and at a penalty camp at that), could hardly have 

survived and kept working if he had not found meaning and interest 

in that logging. Here is how he stood it: The camp chief, 

who took an interest in his few permanent workers (a surprising 

camp chief), in the first place fed them "belly full" with gruel, 

and in the second place permitted only his record-holding shock 

workers to work nights in the kitchen. This was their bonus! 

After a whole day of logging Chulpenyov went to wash and fill 

the food pots, stoke the oven, and clean potatoes until 2 A.M., 

and after that ate his fill and went off to· sleep for three hours 

without taking off his pea jacket. Once, also as a bonus, he was 

allowed to work for one month in the bread-cutting room. And 

he rested up another month by self-mutilation (because he was 

a record holder no one suspected him). And that is all. (But, of 

course, explanations are required here too. In their work gang 

was a woman thief, a veteran bazaar swindler who worked for a 

year as their draywoman, and she was living with two trusties 

at the same time: the weighing-in checker and the warehouse 

manager. As a result, their work gang always overfulfilled its 

norm, and, more important, their horse, Gerchik, ate all the

The Trusties I 259' 

oats he wanted and hauled well. Other horses were rationed ac~ 

cording to the work gang's D.orm fulfillment! I am sick of saying, 

"Poor people/" At least here I can interject, ''Poor h01Se8!") 

But nonetheless seven years on logging without interrup(ion-it 

is almost a legend! But how could you work for seven years if you 

didn't work well, if you didn't find some meaning in it, if you 

didn't become absorbed in the work? All they had to do, said 

Chulpenyov, was to feed me and I would have kept working and 

working. That's the Russ.ian character .... He mastered the technique 

of "continuous felling"-felling in such a way that the first 

branch supported the trunk so it didn't sag, and was easy to trim. 

And all the subsequent trunks w~re dropped atop one another 

/ crissc]Oss so the branches fell neatly into one or two bonfires; 

without having to be hauled away. He knew how to "pUIi" a 

falling tree in exactly the required direction. And when he heard 

from the Lithuanians about Canadian lumberjacks who lor a 

wager would put a stake in the ground and then drive it down 

into the ground with a falling tree, he was filled with enthusiasm: 

"All right, ~e'l try the same thing!" And it worked. 

And that is how it turns out: such is man's nature that even 

bitter, detested work is sometimes performed with an incomprehensibie 

wild excitement. Having worked for two years with my 

. hands, I encountered this strange phenomenon myself: suddenly 

you become absorbed in the work itself, irrespective of whether it 

is slave labor and offers you nothing. I experienced those strange 

moments at bricklaying (otherwise I wouldn't have written about 

it), at foundry work, carpentry, even in the fervor of breaking 

up old pig iron with a sledge. And so surely we can allow Ivan 

Denisovich not to feel his inescapable labor as a terrible burden 

forever, not to hate it perpetually? 

Well, Ill! I see it, they will yield on this point. They will'yield 

to us, but with-the obligatory condition that no reproaches should 

be implied for those trusties who never spent eyen a minute earning 

their daily bre.ad by the sweat of ~heir brow. 

Whether by the .sweat of their brow or not, they at any rate 

carried out the commands of the Gulag bosses diligently. (Other~ 

wise off to general work!) And painstakingly, using their special 

skills! A.fter all, all the significant trusty positions were essential 

links in the camp administration and in camp production. These 

were precisely those specially forged ("skilled") links in *e 

· .. 


chain without which (if every last o~e of the zeks·had refused 

to accept trusty positions!) the whole chain of exploitation wiJuld 

have broken, the entire camp system! Because society outside 

could never have supplied such a quantity of highly skilled specialists 

who werl? willing in addition to live for years in conditions 

unfit for dogs. 

So why didn't they refuse? Why didn't they break the magic 

chain?· 

The trusties' positions were the key positions for exploitation. 

Norm setters! And were their bookkeeper helpers ~uch less 

guilty? The construction superintendents! And were the technicians 

so guiltless themselves? What trusty position did not in 

fact involve playing up to' the bosses and participating in the 

general system of compulsion? Was it only as Cultural and Educational 

Section instructors or .as godfather's orderlies, who did 

the devil's work? And if N. worked as a typist-solely as a typist 

'-yet typed out requisitions for the Administrative Section of the 

camp, did this mean nothing? Let us think about that. And if she 

. ran off copies of orders? This wl{s not for the good of the 

zeks. . . . Let's suppose the security officer had no typist of his 

own. That he himself had to type out his formal charges and the 

final version of. the denunciations--of free persons and zeks he 

was going to imprison the next day. But, you see, he could give 

this material to the typist-and she would type it up and keep 

silent, without warning the endangered person. Yell, for that 

matter, would not a low-ranking trusty, the locksmith of the 

camp workshops, have to fill a requisition for handcuffs? Or 

strengthen the grids of iron bars in the punishment block? Or 

let' us stay among written· materials: what about' the planner? 

Would not an innocent planner aid and abet planned exploitation? 

. 

I do not understand-in what way was this intellectual slave 

labor purer and nobler than physical slave labor? . 

So it is not Ivan Denisovich's sweat we ~hould be getting most 

upset about, but the peaceful pen scratching in the camp office! 

For half my term I myself worked at a sharashka,'" one of 

those Islands of Paradise. We were tom away from the rest of the 

Archipelago, we did not see its shive existence. But were we not 

exactly the same sort of trusties? And did we not, in the very 

broadest sense, by our scientific work, strengthen that same Min-

The Trusties I 261 

istry of Internal Affairs and the overall system of repression?3 

And is not evefything bad that goes on in the Archipelago or 

on the' entire earth ... accomplished through us? Yet we attacked 

Ivan Denisovich-for laying bricks? More of our bricks are there . 

than )lis! 

In camp they more often expressed the contrary insults and 

reproaches: that the trusties rode on the sloggers' backs, devoured 

their food, survived at their expense. These charges were made 

against the compound trusties in particular, frequently not without 

grounds. Who Short-weighed Ivan Denisovich's bread? Who 

stole his sugar by dampening it with water? Who kept fats,meat, 

or good cereals from the common pot? 

e~ohT camp compound trusties on. whom food and clothing 

depended were chosen on a special basis. To get those pbsitions 

impudence, slyness, bribery were required; to hold such jobs 

ruthlessness and a deaf ear to conscience were required (and, in 

most cases, to be a stool pigeon as well). Of course, all generaliza- 

• tions overstate their case; and from my own recollections I can 

undertake to name opposite examples of uncorrupted, honest 

compound trusties-but they didn't laSt long in their posts. As far 

as the bulk of well-fixed camp compound trusties are concerned, 

however, one can say without fear of being wrong that on the 

average more depravity and malice were concentrated among 

them than in the average native population. It was not a matter 

of ,chance that these were the very jobs the camp bo!$Ses gave to 

their former cronies-imprisoned former Security people. When 

the MVD chief of Shakhty District was imprisoned, he wasn't 

sent to cut timber but popped up as work assigner at the headquarters 

camp of Usollag. And when MVD man Boris Guganava 

was imprisoned ("Because I once took a cross off a church, I 

have never since known any happiness in life"), he would be the 

manager of the camp kitchen at ReShoty Station. But another 

3. And this problem goes beyond the bounds of the Archipelago. Its. scale 

is that of our whole society. Have not all our educated strata-technologists 

and those trained in the humanities-been for all these decades precisely the 

, same kind of links in the magic chain, the same kind of "trusties"? Can any 

. one point out to us scholars or composers or cultural historians among even 

the most honest of those who have survived safe, sound, and whole and who 

flourish, who, ·have sacrificed themselves to establish a common life in disregard 

qf their own? . 


seemu"gly quite different breed latched on to this group too. The 

Russian interrogator from Krasnodon who under the Germans 

had conducted the case against the Young Guard· partisans 4 

was an honored work assigner in'one of the divisions of Ozerlag. 

Sasha Sidorenko, a former intelligence agent who had fallen into 

German. hands right off, and who had gone to· work for them 

right off, was now storeroom manager in Kengir and loved getting 

back at the Germans there for his own fate. Hardly had they gone 

to sleep after roll call, tired from the day's work, than he would 

come to them pretending to be drunk and raise a heart-rending 

cry: "Germans! Achtung! I'm ... your God! Sing to me!" (And 

the frightened Germans, rising up on their bunks half asleep, 

began to sing "Lilli Marlene" for him. And what kind of people 

were those bookkeepers who released Loshchilin 5 from camp in 

late. autumn wearing just his shirt? Or that shoemaker in Burepolom 

who, without even a twinge of remorse, took Ans Bemshtein's 

new army boots in return for a bread ration? 

When they got together on their porch for a friendly smoke 

and a chat about camp affairs, it was hard to picture just who 

among them might be different. . 

True, they, too, have something to say in justification of 

themselves. For example, I. F. Lipai wrote a passionate letter: 

The prisoner's ration was outrageously and pitilessly plundered on 

all sides. The thievery of the trusties for their Own sake ... was petty 

thievery. While those' trusties who engaged in larger-scale thievery 

were forced [1] into it. The Administration officials, both free workers 

and prisoners, particularly during wartime, squeezed the paw of the 

division,. officials, and the division officials did the same to the camp 

officials, and the latter did the· same to the storeroom and kitchen 

personnel-and all at the expense of the zek's ration. The most fearful 

sh~ks of all were not the trusties but the nonprisoner chiefs (Kuragin, 

Pois~-Shapka, Ignatchenko from SevDvinlag). They did not just 

steal but "removed" from the storerooms, and not just by the pound, 

but in sacks and barrels. And again it wasn't only for themselvesthey 

had to divvy up. And the trusties had somehow to cover all this 

up and forge the records. And anyone who refused to do it was not· 

, 4. The genuine content of this case, it seems. was vastly different from even 

the first version of Fadeyev. But we will not put our faith solely in camp 

rumors. 

S. For his surprising-or too -ordinary--:-fate, see below, Part IV. Chapter 4.


only sacked frolll his job but sent to a penalty or strict-regimen camp. 

And so the trusty staffs, by the will of the chiefs, were riddled with 

cowards afraid :of physical work, and scoundrels and thieves. And the 

only ones ever prosecuted were storekeepers and bookkeepers, while 

the chiefs kept out of it-after all, it wasn't they who signed the 

receipts. And the interrogators considered it a provocation for storekeepers'to 

testify against bosses. 

The picture is quite'vertical .... 

It so fell out that a woman of my acquaintance, Natalya 

Milevna Anichkova, who was honest in the' extreme, was once 

assigned to manage the camp bakery. At the very beginning she 

deniatre~sa that it was customary to send a certain amount of 

baked bread (from the prisoners' bread rations) outside the camp 

compound daily (without any documents, of course), in return ' 

for which the bakers received a small amount of; preserves and 

butter from the shop for the free employees. ,She forbade ,this 

system, stopped the bread leaving the camp' compound-and 

immediately the bread began to turn out underbaked or rock hard, 

and then the batch would be late (this from the bakers), and then 

they began to withhold flour from the warehouse---and the camp 

chief (he had been getting more out of this than anyone!) refused 

a horse to fetch and deliver. Anichkova struggled fot so many 

days and then surrendered-and at once t1!e work went smoothly 

again. 

Even if a compound trusty was able to keep out of this univer~ 

sal thievery, it was nonetheless nearly impossible for him to desiSt 

from using his privileged position to get himself other benefitssuch 

as Rest P,oint out of turn, hospital food, the best clothing, 

bed linen, or the best place in the. barracks. ~ do not know and 

t~nac picture a trusty so saintly that he never grabbed the least 

tiny bit of something for himself from all those benefits· strewn 

about. And his fellow trusties would have been afraid of him. 

They would have forced him out! Everyone, even though indirectly, 

or in a roundabout way~ even though almost not knowing, 

nonetheless made use of these benefits-and in some,degree lived 

off the §loggers. 

It is hard, very hard, for a compound trusty to have an unsullied 

conscience. 

And then there is another question-about the means with 

,which he got his position. Very rarely was it a clear-cut question 


of quaIifications (as for a physician or for many work trusties); 

The unobjectionable path was to be an invalid. But frequently 

it was the protection of ·the "godfather." Of course, there were 

apparently neutral ways to getthere: people got positions because 

of old prison connections; or thanks to collective group-support 

(often based on ties of nationality-certain of the smaller nationalities 

were successful at this and used traditionally to cluster 

in trusty jobs; and then the Communists used to help each other -. 

out privately). 

And there was another question too. When you were raised 

up, how did you conduct yourself toward the rest, toward the 

common herd? How much arrogance was here, how much rudeness, 

how much forgetfulness that we were all nath'es and that 

our power was transient? 

. And finally the highest question of all: If "you were in no way 

harmful to your brother prisoners, were you at least in any way 

useful to them? Did you ever use your position, even once, to 

defend the general welfare-or only and always on your own? 

. As far as the work trusties_were concerned, it would be quite 

unjust to accuse them· of "eating the sloggers' food," or "riding 

on their backs"; the sloggers weren't paid for their labor, true, 

but not because they fed the trusties. The trusties weren't paid 

for their work either~verything went into the same abyss. But 

the other moral doubts still remain:· the virtual inevitability of 

exploiting advantages in living conditions.; the not always clean 

ways of getting the right assignment; arrogance. And then always 

that same question at the top: What did you do for the general 

. good? Anything at all? Ever? 

Yet there were some who could, like Vasily Vlasov, look back 

on deeds on behalf of the universal good. Yes, such clearhe~ed, 

smart fellows ~ho managed to get around the arbitrary camp 

rules, who helped to organize the common life so not all would 

die, and. so as to deceive both the trust and the camp. Those heroes 

of the Archipelago, who understood their duty not in terms of 

feeding their own persons but as a burden and an obligation to 

the whole prison herd. The tongue simply cannot be twis)ed to 

call such as these "trusties." And most came from the engineers. 

And ... glory to them! ,- 

But for the rest no glory. There is DO reason to put them on a 

pedestal. And there is also no reason for the former' trusties to


be contemptuous of Ivan Denisovich because they succeeded in 

sidestepping all kinds of slave labor and did not lay bricks by 

the sweat of their brow. Nor is it worth arguing that we intellectuals 

expend twice. as much energy on general work--on the 

work itself, and then by a sort of psychic combuStion, on all the 

mentM activity and suffering which we simply cannot stop, and 

as a resUlt of which it is fair for us to avoid the general work; and 

let cruder types slog away. (It is still not clear whether we do 

in fact expend twice as much energy.) 

Yes, in order to abstain from coming to some sort of an "arrangelpent" 

in camp and let the fOJ.:ce of gravity take over and 

drag you down to the bottom, one must have a very. stable soUl, 

a very illumined consciousness, a large part of one's term behind - 

on,e, and, probably, in addition regUlar parcels from home- 

otherwise it is straight suicide. 

As the gratefully guilty old camp veteran D. S. L--v put 

it: If I am alive today, that means someone else was on the list 

for execution in my place that night; if I am alive today, it means 

that someone else suffocated in the lower hold in my place; if I 

am alive today, it means that I got those extra seven ounces of 

bread which the dying man went without. 

All.this is written ... not in reproach. The basic viewpoint of 

this book has already been set forth and will be held to until the 

'end: all who suffered, all who were squeezed, all who were forced 

to make a cruel choice ought rather to be vindicated than accused. 

The more correct thing will·be ... to vindicate them. 

But in forgiving oneself the choice between dyhig and being 

saved'-do not forgetfully cast a stone at the one whose choice 

was even harder. We have already- met such people in this book. 

And there will be more . 

• 

The Archipelago was a world without diplomas, a world in which 

the only credentials were one's own clahns. Th.e zek was not 

supposed to have documents with him, including educational 

records. In arriving at a new camp you yourself woUld invent 

who you would make yourself out to be this time. 

In camp it was advantageous to be a medical assistant, a barber, 

an accordion player-I daren't go. any higher. You woUld ge~ " 

266 I T HB GULAG ARCHIPBL"AGO 

along all right if you were a tinsmith, a glass blower, or an automobile 

mechanic. But woe on you if you were a geneticist or, 

God help you, a philosopher, a linguist, an art historian-then 

you had had it! You would kick the bucket on general work in 

two weeks. 

More than once 1 dreamed of declaring myself a medical assistant! 

How many writers and philOlogists saved themselves in the 

Archipelago this way! But each time I could not make up my 

mind to it-not even because of the superficial examination 

(knowing medicine within the limits of a literate layman, yes, 

and having a smattering of Latin, somehow or other I would have 

bluffed my way through), but I found it awful to picture myself 

giving shots without knowirig how. If there had been only powders, 

syrups, poultices, and cupping, I would have tried it. 

Having learned from my experience at Novy Iyerusalim that 

being a "commander of prciduction" Was repulsive, when I was 

shifted to my next camp, at Kaluga Gates, in Moscow itselfright 

at the threshold, at the gatehouse, I lied, saying that I was 

a norm setter (I had heard that term in camp for the first time in 

my life, and I had not the faintest idea what norm setting was, 

but I hoped it was along mathematical lines ). 

The reason I had to tell my lie right there at the gatehouse, on 

the threshold, was that the site chief, Junior Lieutenant Nevezhin, 

a tall, gl~omy hunchback, came to question the new prisoner 

transporf right away then and there at the gatehouse despite our 

_" arrival at night; he had to decide by-morning who was to be sent 

where, he was that businesslike. With a distrustful stare he sized 

up my officer's britches stuffed into my boots, my long-skirted 

overcoat, my face lit up with eagerness to serve, arid asked me a 

couple of questions about norm setting. (I felt I had replied skillfully, 

but I realized afterward that my first two words had exposed 

"me to Nevezhin.) And in the morning I was not taken out to 

work--:::-..! had been victorious. Two days passed and he appointed 

me-not'a norm setter, but much higher-"works manager." In 

other words, I was senior to the work assigner--chief of all the 

brigadiers! I had got out of the frying pan into the fire! There had 

been no such post before I came there. That showed what a loyal 

dog I had 10Qked to him to be! And what a one Nevezhin would 

have made of me too! 

_ But once again my career fell through. God saved me: that

The Trusties 267 

same week Nevezbin was removed from his post for stealing 

building materials. He had a very powerful personality,possessed 

an almost hypnotic stare, and he did not even have to raise his 

voice for the whole line-up to listen to him in trepidation. On 

grounds both of age-he was over fifty-and of camp experience 

and his own cruelty he ought long since to have-been an NKVD 

general, imd they said he had in fact already been a lieutenant 

colonel; however, he could not overcome his passion for stealing. 

He was never arrested because he was one of then- own, but instead 

was merely removed from duty for a time and each time 

reduced in rank: And now he hadn't ·even been able to hold 

on to the rank of junior lieutenant either. Lieutenant Mironov, 

who replaced him, didn't have the patience to train anyone, and 

I myself could not get it into my head that what they wanted was 

for me to be a crushing hammer. Mi,ronov turned out to be dissatisfied 

with me in every way, and he was even annoyed with 

and rejected my energetic reports: . 

"You don't even know how to write, you have a clumsy style." 

And he held out to me the report by Pavlov, . the foreman: ''Here's 

a man who Jcnows how to Write." 

"On analyzation of certain facts of reduction of fulfillment· of 

plan there is: 

1. insufficient quantity of construction materials - 

2. because of incomplete supply with tools of the brigades 

3. upon ihsuffi.cient organization of work on the .side of 

technical personnel 

4. and also safety· precautions are not being observed." 

The value of this style was that the work management was to 

blame for everything and the camp administration ..• for nothing. 

Incidentally, this Pavlov, a former tank officer (who. still went 

around in his helmet), had a similar way of talking: "n you understand 

about love, then prove to me what's love." 

(He was discussing a familiar subject: he was unanimously' 

praised by the women who had been intimate with him. In camp 

this sort of thing is not kept very secret.) 

The second week there I was demoted in disgrace to general 

work, and in my place they appointed that same Vasya Pavlov. 

ecn~S I had not contested with him for the place and had not 


resisted my ouster, he sent me out ndt with a(Sbovel but with a 

painters' brigade. 

The whole brief history of my leadership did; however, secure 

me an advantage in living conditions: as works manager I was 

housed in a special trusties' room, one of the two priv~leged rooms 

in the camp. And Pavlov was already living in the other such 

room, and when I was dismissed no worthy claimant turned up 

for my cot, and for several months I continued to live on there. 

And at the time I valued only the better living conditions in 

this room: Instead of multiple bunks there were ordinary cots 

and one bed table for every two persons, not for a whole brigade. 

During the day the door was locked and you could leave your 

things there. Last, there was a half-legal electric hot plate, arid 

it was not necessary to go and crowd around the big common 

stove in the yard. Slave of my oppressed and frightened body, 

I valued only this at the time. 

But now, when I have an urge to write about my neighbors in 

that room, I realize what its principal advantage was: never again 

in my life, either through personal inclination or in the social 

labyrinth, would I get close to such people as Air Force General 

Belyayev and the MVD man Zinovyev, who, if not a general, was 

close to it. 

I now know that a writer cannot afford to give in to feelings 

of rage, disgust, or contempt. Did you answer someone in a temper? 

If so, you didn't hear him out and lost track of his, system 

of opinions. You avoided someone out of disgust-and a completely 

unknown personality slippeq out of your ken-precisely 

the type you would have needed someday. But, however tardily, 

I nonetheless caught myself and realized I had always devoted my 

time and attention to people who fascinated me and were pleasant, 

who engaged my sympathy, and that as a result I was seeing 

society like the Moon, always from one side. 

But just as the Moon, as it swings slightly back and forth 

("libration"), shows us a portion of its dark side too--so that 

chamber of monstrosities disclosed people unknown to me. 

Air Force Major General Aleksandr Ivanovich Belyayev 

,(everyone in camp still called him "general") was invariably 

noticed by every hew arrival on the first day in the first line-up. 

He stood out from the whole blackish-gray, lousy camp column,


not only in height and bearing, but because of his excellent leather 

coat, no doubt foreign-made, of a kind you would not see on the 

street in Moscow (the people who wore them ride about in automobiles) 

and even more because of his particular air of nonpresence. 

Even without stirring in the camp column he was able 

to demonstrate that he had no relationship what~ver to all that 

camp rabble swarming about him, that he would even die without 

realizing how he had come to be there. Stretched to his full height 

he looked over the heads of the mob, just as if he were reviewing 

a completely different parade which we could not'see. And when 

the trooping out began and the guard at the gatehouse whacked 

a board across the backs of the zeks on the outside in the departing 

fivt'!S, Belyayev. (in his brigade of work trusties) tried never 

to be the one on the end. If he did happen to get there, then he 

squeamishly shuddered and bent down !IS he went past the gatehouse, 

showing by his whole back how he held the gatehouse 

sentry in contempt. And the latter did not dare to touch him. 

While I was still works manager, in other words an important 

chief, I became acquainted with the general in the following 

way: In the construction office where he was working as assistant 

norm setter I noticed that he waS smoking, and I approached him 

to get a light from his cigarette. I politely asked his permission 

and had already bent over his desk in readiness. With a sltarp 

gesture Belyayev jerked his cigarette from in. front of mine, as 

though fearing I might infect it, got out an expensive chromeplated 

lighter, and placed it down before me. It was easier for 

him to let me soil and spoil his lighter'than to lower himself by 

holding his cigarette for me! I was embarrassed. And whenever 

anyone was impudent enough to ask him for a light from his 

cigarette he always placed his expensive lighter in front of him 

the same way, thus crushing him completely and dispelling any 

desire to approach him a second time. And if anyone managed 

to catch him at the very moment when he himself was lighting 

up with his lighter, and hastened to shove a cigarette toward him 

-he calmly blew out the lighter, closed its top, and placed it, 

like that, in front of the person approaching. ,This gave them to 

understand the whole magnitude of his sacrifice. And if there 

was no one else from whom to get a light, all the free foremen and 

prisoner brigadiers who swarmed in the office went outdoors in . 

the courtyard to get one rather than to him. 


Housed in the same room with him now, and_with our cots in 

fact side by side, I was able to discover that squeamishness, disdain, 

and irritation were the principal feelings possessing him 

in his situation as a prisoner. Not only did he never go to the 

camp mess hall ("I don't even know where the door to it is!"), 

but he wouldn't let our neighbor Prokhorov bring him anything 

from the camp slops-except his bread ration. Was there any 

other zek in the Archipelago who could have so mocked his poor 

bread ration? Belyayev took it gingerly like a dirty toad-for, 

you see, it had been touched by hands and carried on wooden 

trays-and trimmed it with his knife· on all six side8-()utting 

off both the crust and the dough as well. These six cut-off pieces· 

he never .gave to those who asked for them-to Prokhorov or the 

old-man orderly-but threw them in the slop bucket. Once I 

was even so bold as to ask him why he did not give them to 

Prokhorov. He proudly threw back his -head, his white hair 

cropped very short (he wore his hair so short s~ that it would 

seem both a hair style and a camp haircut): "My cellmate at the 

Lubyanka once asked me: 'Please let me finish your soup!' I was 

nearly sick to my stomach! I . .. react very painfully to human 

humiliation!" He-refused bread to the hungry so as not to hum~liate 

them! 

~hT general'was able to preserve all this haughtiness with such 

ease because there was a trolleybus No.4 stop near the gatehouse. 

Every day at 1 P.M. when we returned from the work compound 

to the residence compound for lunch, the general's wife would 

-descend from a trolleybus at the outer gatehouse, bringing a hot 

meal in thermose$, cooked just an hour before in the general's 

kitchen at home. On weekdays they were n~t permitted to meet, 

and the thermoses were handed over by the· turnkey. But on 

Sundays they spent half an hour together at the gatehouse. They 

said his wife always left· in tears; Aleksandr Ivanovich took out 

on her everything that had accumulated in his proud and suf-' 

fering soul in the course of a week. 

Belyayev made qpe accurate observation: '''In camp it is impossible 

to keep things or foodstuffs simply- in a box or simply 

under lock and key. The box has to be a steel box and bolted 

to the floor." But from this there followed the conclusion: "Out 

of a hundred people in camp eighty are scoundrels!" (He didn't 

say ninety~fi.ve so as not to lose all his listeners.) "If I should

The Trusties· I 271 

ever meet anyone from in here out in freedom anq that person 

should rush up to me, 1 would ~y: 'You are insane! 1 have never 

met you before!' " 

"How 1 suffer from b~ackS-living!" he said. (This with only 

six people there!) "If only 1 could eat by myself, locked in 

alone!" Was he hinting that we ought to go out while pe ate? 

He especia1J.y wanted to eat alone! Was it because what" he ate 

today was incomparable with what others ate, or was it simply 

out of his own circle's established custom of hiding their bounty 

from the hungry? 

On the other hand, he loved to talk with l!S, a~d it is highly 

unlikely tha~ he would really have liked to' be in a separate room. 

But the way he liked to talk was one-sided-loudly; self-confidently, 

and only about himself: ''They offered me another caJl).P 

with more comfortable conditions .... " (I can quite well pIcture 

that they do offer such ao, him a choice.) "That never happens 

to me." "Do you know, J ... " "When 1 was in the Anglo-Egyptian 

Sudan ... " But nothing of any interest at all came after that, 

just some sort of nonsense to provide some kind of Justification 

for that resounding introduction: "When 1 was in the Anglo 

Egyptian Sudan ... " 

He had really been around and seen sights. He was less than 

fifty and was still good and strong. There was just one strange 

thing: he was an Air Force major general, but he never talked 

about a single battle flight, not even one single flight And yet, 

judging by his own account, he was the head of our Air Force 

purchasing mission in the United States during the war. America 

had evidently astonished him. And he managed to buy.a lot there 

too. He never lowered himself to explain to us what precisely he 

had been arrested for, but evidently it was in connection with this 

American trip or his stories about it. "OtsepO proposed the path 

of complete conft;ssion. 7 But 1 said, 'I would rather have my 

term doubled, but 1 am guilty of nothing!'" One can readily 

believe that as far as the government was concerned he was 

innocent of any guilt; they gave him not a double.but a half-term 

-five years, when even sixteen-year-old chatterboxes got more 

than that. 

Looking at him and listening to him, 1 used to think: This is 

6. A well·known Soviet lawyer • 

. 7. In other words, he seconded the interrogator. 


what he is like now! After the rough fingers had tom his shoulder 

boards off (I can just picture how he had cringed!), after the 

body searches, after the boxes, after the Black Marias, after 

"Hands behind your backs!"-he did not allow himself to be 

contradicted even in petty tl:\ings, let alone in big things. (Big 

things' he would not even have discussed with us, since we were 

unworthy, except for Zinovyev.) But not once did 1 ever see him 

absorb any thought he himself had not expressed. He was simply 

incapable of accepting any argument! He knew everything before 

we spoke! What had he been like earlier as head of the purchasing 

mission, a Soviet envoy to the West? A polished, white-faced, 

impenetrable sphinx, a symbol of the "New Russia," as they 

understood it in the West. What would it have been like to approach 

him with a request? Or to ~hove your head into his office 

. with a request? How he would have barked! How he'd come down 

on you! It would have explained a lot if he had come from a long 

line of military men-but he hadn't. These Himalayas of selfassurance 

had been mastered by a Soviet general of the first generation. 

During the Civil War in the Red Army he was probably 

a young fellow in bast sandills who couldn't sign his name. How 

had all this come into being so swiftly? ... He had always been 

in an elite circle-even aboard trains, even at resorts, always with 

those of his own group, behind the iron, gates where entrance was 

permitted only with passes. 

And what about the others? More likely to be like him than 

different. And what would happen if the truth that the "sum of 

the angles of a triangle is ~qual to 180 degrees" were to threaten 

their private residences, their ranks, their assignments abroad? 

In that case they would cut off your head for drawing a"triangle! 

Triangular pediments would be knocked off all houses! A decree 

would be issued that angles henceforth were to be measured in 

radians! 

And once again 1 thought: What about me? Why couldn't they 

have made the same sort of general out of me in the course of 

twenty years? Of course they could have. 

And once again 1 looked closely: Aleksandr Ivanovich was not 

at all a bad chap. When he read Gogol he laughed warmly. And 

he used to make us all laugh when he was in a good mood. He 

had an intelligent laugh. If 1 had wanted to nourish hatred for 

'him in myself-there when we were lying next to one another on


our cots--I could not have done it. The way was not closed for 

him to become a fully good person. But-only through suffering. 

Thtough suffering. . 

Pavel Nikolayevich Zinovyev didn't go. to the camp mess hall 

either, and also would have liked to arrange things so that he 

had his meals brought to him in the~os jugs. It was a bitter pill 

to swallow to be left behind Belyayev, to turn out to be on a 

lower rung. But his circumstances were more difficult. Belyayev 

had nQ.t been punished by confiscation ·of his property, whereas 

Zinovyev had been subjected to partial confiscation. His money, 

his savings accounts had evidently all been hauled in and taken 

from him, and all that was left him was a good rich apartment. 

And how he used to love to talk about that aparti:il.ent-time and 

time again, at great length, smacking his lips over every detail 

of the bath, realizing what enjoyment we must be getting froni 

his story. He even had a saying of his own: After forty a man's 

value is determined by his apartment! (He. used to recotriJ.t all this ~ 

in Belyayev's absence because Belyayev would,not even have 

listened to him but would have started telling stories about himself 

instead, although not·about his apartment, for he considered him~ 

self an intellectual, but perhaps about ~e Sudan again.) But according 

to Pavel Nikolayevich, his wife was ill and his daughter 

was obliged to work---:and there was no one to bring him any 

thermoses. However, even the food parcels he received on SUn~ 

days were modest. And he was forced to bear his situation with 

the pride of an impoverished nobleman. Nonetheless he did not go 

to the mess hall, disdaining the filth there and the mass of chomping 

rabble, but he used to ask Prokhorov to bring both the gruel 

and the cereal to the room, where he warmed thein up on the 

hot plate. He would willingly have cut six sides off the bread 

ration too, but he had no other bread, and he therefore limited 

himself to holding his bread ration over the hot plate, burning 

from all six sides the microbes implanted there by the hands of 

the bread-cutters and Prokhorov. He did not go to the mess hall 

and could ·even on occasion renounce his gruel, but he didn't 

have enough blue-blooded pride to restrain· himself from petty 

begging in the room: "Could I just try a tiny piece? I haven't 

eaten any oJ that for 11 long time .... " 

On the whole he was exaggeratedly gentle and polite--till 


something rubbed him the wrong way. His. politeness was particularly 

notable beside Belyayev's unnecessary rudenes~ Inwardly 

restrained, outwardly restrained, with a deliberate way of chewing 

and cautious movements:---he was the genuine Chekhov character 

"The Man in the Case." So true to life that there is no 

need to describe the rest of it, he was just as in Chekhov, except 

that he was not a· schoolteacher, but an MVD general. It was 

impossible to use the electric hot plate even for a second during 

those minutes Pavel Nikolayevich had set aside fer himself; be- , 

neath his snakelike stare you just jerked your mess tin off the 

hot plat.e immediately, and if you hadn't ... he would have ticked 

you off pronto. During the lengthy Sunday daytime roll calls in 

·the courtyard I used to try to take a book out with me (always 

about physics, keeping as far from literature as possible) ,; and I 

hid behind the backs of those in front and read. Oh, what torments 

this violation of discipline gave Pavel Nikolayevich! You 

see, I was reading in formation, in sacred formation! And by 

doing this I was stressing my own challenge, flaunting my insolence. 

He didn't attack me directly, but stared at me in such 

a way, and squirmed in such torment, so groaned and grunted, 

that all the other trusties were sick of my reading too, so in the 

, end I had to renounce my book, and stand there like an idiot 

for an hour at a time. (And you couldn't read in the room, you 

had to listen to the stories.) Once one of the girl bookkeepers 

from the constructi


But it seemed as if she were invisibly whipping him across the 

cheeks, becttuse spots, spots of red, flamed on his lusterless womanlike 

skin, and his ears blushed crimson and his lips twitched. 

He ruffled up but sajd nary another word and did not attempt 

to raise his hand in self-defense. That same day he complained 

to me: "What can I do with the incorrigible directness of my 

personality! It is my misfortune that even here I can't get away 

from discipline. I am compelled to utter reprimands; it disciplines 

those nearby." 

He .was always nervous at the moining line-up-h~ ,wanted 

to rush to work as quickly as possible. And hardly' had_ the 

trusty brigade been let into the work compound than he very 

demonstratively overtook all those who were not hurrying, whose 

pace was leisurely, and almost ran into the office. Did' he want 

the chiefs to observe him? Not very important. Was it so the zeks 

would see how intensely busy he was at his work? In part, yes. 

But the most important, thing, the most sincere part, was to 

separate himself from the crowd as swiftly as possible, to get out 

of the camp compound, to hide himself in the quiet little planning 

section and once there . . . once there, certainly not to do the 

kind of work Vasily Vlasov did, trying to figure out how to rescue 

the working brigades, but instead, for whole hours at a time, to 

loaf, to smoke, to dream about one more amnesty, and to imagine 

another desk for himself, another office, with a buzzer to summon 

people, with several telephones, with servile secretaries, with 

visitors stifiIy at attention. 

Little we knew about him! He didn't like to speak of his MVD 

past-nor about his rank, his positions, or ~e nature of his work 

-the customary "reticence" of the former MVD men. But his 

greatcoat was, as it happens, that same sort of dark bluish-gray 

that is"described by the authors of the book about the White 

Sea-Baltic Canal. And not even in camp did it occur to him to 

rip the sky-blue edgings off his tunic and his britches. During 

his two yearS' imprisonment he had evidently not had to encounter 

the real gaping maw of camp, to sniff th~ abyss of the 

Archipelago. Our camp had of course been assigned him by his 

choice: his apartment was just a few trolleybus stops from the 

camp, somewhere on Kaluga Square. And, not realizing the 

depths to which he had fallen, or just how hostile he was being to 

his present company, he sometimes let something drop in the 

room: One day he disclosed a close acquaintanceship with Krug- 


lOY (whO at that time was not yet Ministei" of Intenial Affairs), 

another with Frenkel, or with Zavenyagin, all big shots in Gulag. . 

Once he recalled that during the war he had been in charge of' 

construction on a large section of the Syzran-Saratov Railroad, 

and this meant he ):lad been in Frenkel's GVLZhDS. What did 

he mean-in charge? He was no engineer. Had he been chief 

of camp administration? Another darling Kleinmikhel?* And 

then, from those heights, he had painfully fallen almost to the 

level of an ordinary prisoner. He had been sentenced under Article 

109, and in the MVD that meant that he. had ,taken more 

than his rank permitted. They gav~ him seven years-as one of 

their own. That meant that he had grabbed off enough for a whole 

twenty. Under Stalin's amnesty they had already knocked off 

'half of what remained, and he was therefore left with two years 

and a fraction. But he suffered-just as much as if he'd had the 

whole tenner. 

The one and only window in our room looked out on the 

Neskuchny Park. Quite close to the window and just a bit below 

us the treetops rustled. Everythi)lg kept changing there: snowstorms, 

thaws, the fitst fOliage. When Pavel Nikolayevich was not 

being irritated by anything inside and was only moderately sad, 

he would stand at the window, looking out at the park, and 

croon softly and pleasantly: . 

Sleep deep, my heart!. _ 

Don't awaken, don't arouse what used to be. 

And there he was-a most agreeable person in a drawing 

room! But how many mass graves had he left along his section of 

the trackl . , 

The comer of the Neskuchny Park facing our compound was 

set off, by hillocks from people strolling in the park ~nd was secluded, 

or would have been, if you ~d not count our shaven 

heads peering out of windows. On May 1 some lieutenant brought 

to. this hiding .place bis girl, who was wearing a bright-colored 

dress. Here they were concealed from the rest of the park, but 

they paid no more heed to us than to the stare of a dog or a cat. 

Theo,fficer laid his girl right there on the grass; and she was not 

shy either. 

Do riot call back what has' dashed off afar, 

Do not loY«: what you used to love.


On the whole our room was a model room. The 'MVD man 

and the general ran us. We could make use of the hot plate only 

with their permission (it was a people's hot plate) when they 

were not using it themselves. They Qlone decided whether the 

room should be ventilated or not, where to put our shoes, where 

to l)ang trousers, when to stop talking, when to go to sleep, when 

to wake up. Several steps down the corridor was the door to the 

big barracks room where a republic led its stormy life, where 

they kept sending all authorities "up the mouth," "up the nose," 

etc. But here we had privileges,. and in clinging to them, we also 

had to observe all the legalities. Having been booted into the 

insignificant painters' brigade I had no say: I had become a 

proletarian and at any moment they might cast me out into the 

common barracks. The peasant Prokhorov, even though he was 

considered the "brigadier" of the work trusties, had b~n appointed 

to that position chiefly to act as servant-to carry bread 

and mess tins, to communicate with the jailers and the barracks 

orderlies, in a word to perform all the dirty work (it was this 

very same peasant" who had 1ed the two generals). * And so it 

. w~ that we were compelled to submit to our dictators. But where 

was the great Russian intelligentsia and what was it looking at? 

,Dr. Pravdin* (and I did not invent the name either) was a 

neuropathologist and the camp physician. He was seventy. This 

meant that the Revolution had arrived when he was already in 

his forties, that he had come to full maturity during the best 

period of Russian thought, in the spirit of conscientiousness, 

honor, and reverence for the common people. And what· an appearance! 

An enormous venerable head with silvery flopping 

gray hair which the camp clippers did not dare to touch (a special 

privilege from the chief of the Medical Section). His portrait 

would have embellished the finest medical journal in the world! 

Any country would have been honored to have such a minister 

of health! His big nose, which knew its own value, inspired total 

confidence in his diagnoses. His movements were all dignified. 

He was so capacious' a doctor that he hardly fitted on a single 

. metal cot and hung over the sides. 

I don't know how good a neuropathologist he was. It is quite 

possible he could have been a good one, but only in a mellow, 

well-mannered epoch, and most certainly not in a government 

hospital, but at his own house, behind his brass nameplate on an 

,oaken door, to the melodic chiming of a grandfather. clock against 


the wall, and not subordinate to anything except his. own conscience. 

However, he had been thoroughly frightened since then 

-frightened enough to last the rest of his life. I don't know 

whether he had ever been imprisoned before, whether perhaps 

he had been hauled out to be shot during the Civil War (this 

would not have been surprising). But even without a revolver 

at his head he had been frightened enough. It was enough to 

have had to work in outpatient departments where they had demanded 

he see nine patients an hour. where there was only 

enough time- to tap for a knee jerk with a rubber ma~et; and to 

have been a member of an Experts' Commission on Workmen's 

Disabilities (VTEK), and a lJ!,ember of a Health Resort Commission. 

and a member of a military conscription board, with 

papers everywhere to sign, sign. sign. and to know that your 

head was at stake with every signature, that some doctors had al 

!eady been arrested, others threatened, and you still had to keep 

signing medical certificates, and diagnoses and expert testimony, 

and medical attestations and histories· of illnesses, and every 

single signature involved a Hamlet-like soul-searching as to 

whether a given patient should be freed from work or not, 

\Vhether he was suitable for service or not, whether he was sick 

or healthy. Sick people implored you in one direction and the 

bosses pulled you in the other, and the frightened dO~Qr would· 

lose his presence of mind. become a prey to doubt and trepidation, 

and then remorse .. 

But all that was out in freedom. those were sweet-nothings! 

In here, arrested as an enemy of the people, so terr..ified by the 

interrogator that he was ready to die of a heart attack (I can 

imagine how many people. a whole medical institute. no doubt, 

he may have dragged there with him in such a state of terror!) 

-what was he now? An ordinary scheduled visit of the free 

chief of the Medical Section of the camp, an old toper with no 

medical education, put Pravdin into such a c,?ndition of nervousness 

and total confusion that he was quite incapable of reading 

the Russian texts on the hospital cards. His doubts now multiplied 

by ten. In camp he was simply in such a state he didn't 

know whether a prisoner could be freed from work with a temperature 

of 99.86 degrees or not. \V.hat if they dressed him down? 

And he would come to our room. to get our advice. He could 

maintain a calm equilibrium no longer than a day at .a time--


one day after he had been praised by the camp chief or even a 

junior jailer. As a result of this praise he somehow felt himseH 

. safe for the next twenty-four hours. But the next morning he was 

again overtaken by a sense of implacable alarm. One day an 

extremely urgent prisoner transport was dispatched' from the 

camp and they, were in !luch a hurry that there was no time to 

arrange for baths. (It was fortunate they didn't simply drive 

them naked into the icy spray.) The senior jailer came to Pravdin 

and ordered him to sign a certificate to the effect that the 

transported prisoners had undergone hygienic processing. Pravdin, 

as always, obeyed the orders-but you should have seen 

him afterward! Coming to the room, he sank onto his cot like 

someone in a state of collapse. He clutched at his heart, he 

groaned, and would not listen to our reassurances. We went to 

sleep. He smoked one cigarette after another, ran back and forth 

to the toilet, and. finally, after midnight, dtessed himself, and 

with the look of a madman went to the duty jailer whose nickname 

was Shorty-an illiterate pithecanthropus, but with a star on his 

forage cap-to ask his advice: What would happen to him now? 

'Y ould they or would they not give him a second term under 

Article 58 for this crime? Or would they only send him away 

from his Moscow camp to a far-distant one? (His family was in 

Moscow and used to bring him rich parcels, so he clung to our 

minicamp for all he was worth.) 

Intimidated and frightened, Pravdin lost his will to do anything, 

even in preventive hygiene. He was totally unable to make 

demands on the cooks or the barracks orderlies or even his own 

Medical Section. It was dirty in the mess hall, in the kitchen the 

bowls were badly washed, and in the Medical Section itseH it 

was never clear whether the blankets were ever shaken out. He 

knew all this, but was incapable of insisting on cleanliness. There 

was only one fetish which he shared with the whole camp administration 

(it was a whim known to many camps)-the daily 

washing down of the floors in the residence quarters. This was 

carried out without fail. The air and the cots never dried out because 

of the eternally wet and rotting floors. Pravdin was regarded 

without respect by even the lowliest last-legger in the 

camp. Throughout his prison career he was left unplundered and 

uncheated only by those who didn't feel like bothering. Only because 

our room was locked up all night did his tl).ings, scattered 


about his bed, remain intact, -and his night table, the most disorderly 

in the camp, from which everything kept falling onto the 

floor, remain unplundered. 

Pravdin had been imprisoned for eight years under Articles 

-58-10 and 58-11, in other words as a political propagandist and 

organizer, but I discovered in him the naivete of a backward 

child! Even in his third year of imprisonment he had still not 

matured to the level of the thoughts he had confessed to at his 

interrogation. He believed we had all been imprisoned only temporarily, 

as a kind of joke, and that a- magnificent and generous 

amnesty was being prepared so 1;bat we would value freedom all 

the more and Qe eternally grateful to the Organs for this lesson. 

e~ believed in the prosperity of the collective farms, in the infamous 

perfidy of the Marshall Plan for enslaving Europe, and 

in the intrigues of the Allies striving to start a third world war. 

Iremember that he came in radiant one day,-shining with that 

quiet, benevolent happiness that believers return with after a good 

vespers. Set in his large, good-natured, open face, his always 

prominent eyes, with sagging lower lids, were all aglow with an 

unearthly meekness. It turned out that a meeting of the camp 

compound trusties had just. taken place. The camp chief had 

first shouted at them and banged his fist, but then all of a sudden 

had calmed down and said that he trusted them as his-loyal 

assistants! And Pravdin touchingly confided in us: "I got back 

all my enthusiasm for our work after those words!" (To give 

the general his due, he made a contemptuous grimace.) 

_ The doctor's name did not lie: he was truth-loving and loved 

truth. He loved it, but he was unworthy of it! 

In our tiny model he was merely amusing. But if one moves 

from this tiny model to the larger scale, it's enough to make 

your blood run cold. What proportion, what percentage, of our 

spiritual Russia has come to this? Purely as a result of fear ... 

Pravdin had grown up in a cultured milieu, and all his life 

he had been occupied with mental work; he had been surrounded 

by intellectually sophisticated people-but was he really an 

intellectual, in other words a person with an individual intellect 

of his own? - 

Over-the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, 

the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in 

it-but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this


word has acquited a completely distorted meaning. They began _ 

to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't y.rork (and 

are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, 

and trade-union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers 

and accountants-the mechanical slaves of Debit. All 

office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all 

teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks 

and have neither independenr1mowledge nor an independent 

view of education). All physicians, including those capable only 

of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without 

the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of 

editoriai, offices, publishing houses,cinema studios, andphilharmonic 

orchestras are included here, not even to mention those 

who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle-bow. 

And yet the. truth is ~at not one of these criteria permits a 

person to be classified in the intelligentsia. H we do not want to 

lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not 

defined by pr~fesional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are 

good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to 

produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests 

in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent 

and constant and not forced by external circumstances, 

even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose _ 

. thought is nonimitative. 

In our chamber of monstrosities the leading intellectuals were 

considered to be Belyayev and Zinovyev; and as for the foreman 

Orachevsky and the stock clerk· and toolmaJcer, the coarse, lincultured 

fellow Prokhorov, their presence offended the feelings 

of these highly placed people; and during the period when I was 

prime minister, the general and the MVD man both managed to 

appeal to me, trying to persuade me to toss both these peasants 

Qut of our room-because of their slovenliness, their way of lying 

down on their cots in their boots, and in general for their lack 

of intellectual qualities. (The generals wen: giving thought to 

getting rid of the peasant who fed them!) But, in fact, I liked 

them both-I myself am a peasant at heart. And so a balance 

was established in ~e room. (And very soon no doubt the generals 

spoke to someone about me--trying to have me thrown out 

as well.) . 

- Orachevsky really did have a coarse exterior and there was 


nothing "intellectual" about him. In music he understood nothing 

but Ukrainian songs. He had· never heard anything at all of ancient 

Italian painting nor of modern French painting. Whether 

he loved books I couldn't say because we had none in the camp. 

He never intervened· in the abstract arguments which used to 

start up in the room. He seemed not even to hear Belyayev's best 

monologues on the subject of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and 

Zinovyev's on his apartment. During his free time he preferred to 

brood for long periods in gloomy silence, with his feet placed on 

the rail at the foot of the cot, the heels of his boots on the rail 

itself, their soles aimed at the generals. (Not out of a desire to 

taunt, but because in getting rea.dy for line-up, or in the lunch 

interval or in the evening, if. one expects togo out again, how 

could any reasonable person renounce the satisfaction of lying 

down for a moment? And it was a lot of fuss to take boots offthey 

had been pulled tightly over two sets of footcloths.) Orachevsky 

also failed to react to the doctor's self-torments and doubts. 

And then suddenly, after having been silent an hour or two, he 

Inight, quite regardless of what was going on in the room at that 

time, declare tragically: "Yes! It is easier for a camel to pass 

through the eye of a needle than for a 58 to get out of jail." On 

the other hand, in practical arguments, on the attributes of everyday 

objects, or· on correct conduct in everyday life,he might 

mobilize all his Ukrainian stubbornness to assert and prove with 

great passion that felt bot~valenki-spoil from being dried 

out on the stove, and that it was better and pleasanter to wear 

them the whole winter without drying them out. So, of course, 

what kind of intellectual could he bel 

But he alone of all of us was sincerely devoted to the construction 

project, he alone could speak with interest about it 

in nonworking time. Leammg that the zeks had managed to 

break down the partitions between rooms that were already completely 

installed and use them for fire'Yood, he seized his rough 

head with his rude hands and rocked back and forth as if in 

pain. He could not comprehend the natives' barbarity! Perhaps 

because he had been in prison for only one year. Someone came 

and said that they had dropped a concrete block from the eighth 

floor. Everyone exclaimed: "Did it kill anyone?" But Orachevsky 

said: "Did you see how it broke? .What directions did the 

cracks run in?"· (The slabs had been cast according to his draw-

The trUsties I 283 

ings, and what he wanted to know was whether he had put the 

reinforcing rods in the right places. ) In the severe December cold 

the brigadiers and the foremen had gathered in the office one 

day to warm themselves and recount assorted camp gossip. Orachevsky 

came in, took off a mitten, and triumphantly and with 

great care emptied from it onto the desk an unmoving but still 

living orange and black beauty of a butterfly. "Now that's a 

butterfly for you-to survive a frost like that at five below! She 

was sitting on one of the rafters." 

Everyone gathered around the butterfly and all fell silent. 

Those of us who proved fortunate enough to survive would be 

unlikely to end our terms with any more liveliness in them than 

that butterfly. 

Orachevsky had been given only fiye years. He had been imprisoned 

for a facial crime (really out of Orwell)-for'a smile! 

He had been an instructor in a field engineers' school. While 

showing another teacher in the classroom something in Pravda, 

he had smiled! The other teacher W!lS killed soon after, so DO 

one ever found out what Orachevsky had been smiling at. But 

, the smile had been observed, and the fact of smiling at the central 

organ of the Party was in itself sacrilege! Then Orachevsky 

was invited, to make a political report. He replied that he would 

carry out the order but he would be making the report without 

enthusiasm. This had filled the cup to overflowing! 

Now which of the two-Pravdin or Orachevsky-was the 

closer to being an intellectual? 

And there is no getting around speaking of Prokhorov here. 

He was a portly peasant, heavy-footed, with a heavy stare, and 

not much friendliness in his face, for he only smiled after thinking 

something through. In the Archipelago men like that are 

called "gray wolf." He had no inclination to make any concessions 

of his own or to do good to anyone. But what I liked about 

him right off was this: In bringing Zinovyev his. mess tins and 

Belyayev his bread Prokhorov'was not servile, with a false smile 

or even an empty word. Somehow he delivered these things majestically 

and with reserve, showing thereby that service was 

service but that he was no mere boy. To feed his big worker's 

body he had to have a lot· to eat For the sake of ,the general's 

gruel and grits he. was willing to suffer his humiliating position 

284 TH"E GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

in silence; knowing that they despised him there, he did Dot answer 

them rudely, but neither did he gC) running off in a flurry of 

haste for them "on tiptoe."8 He could see through all.of us, every 

last one of us he could see through, as if we were naked, but 

the occasion never did arise for him to speak his mind. I felt 

" about Prokhorov that he" was founded on bedrock, that much 

in our people rests on shoulders like his; He was in DO hurry 

to smile at anyone; his gaze was sullen; but he never snapped at 

anyone's heels either. 

He had not been imprisoned under Article 58, but he understood 

the facts of ~e from beginning to 'end. For many years 

he had been the chairman of a village soviet near Naro-Fominsk. 

In that kind of job one also had to know how to twist and turn, 

and be cruel, and stand one's ground ~gainst the higher-ups. 

Here is how he described his work as chairman: " 

"To be a patriot means always ~o be out in the lead. And it is 

obvious that you are going to be the first to run into all kinds 

of trouble. You make a report to the village soviet, and even 

though village talk for the most part comes "down to 11IIJteriai 

things, nonetheless same long-bem:d lets fly: 'What's permanent , 

revolution?' The devil take it; whatever it is, I kI\ow that city 

women wear permanents, and if you don't answer him, they'D 

say: 'You've stuck your pig's snout where it doesn't belong.' 

And so I say that it is a kind of revolution that twists and turns 

and can't be held in the hand-go to the city and look at the 

women's curls, or on a sheep. And when our people started cursfug 

tJut MacDonald, I corrected the authorities in my report: 

'And you, comrades,' I said, 'would do better to step less on other 

dogs' tails!' " 

Over the years he had become familiar with all the window 

dressing of our life, and had himself participated. He" sUJDJDoned 

the collective faim chairman ane day and said: "Get one milk- . 

maid ready for a gold medal at the agricultural fair-with a daily 

milking record of sixty liters!" And in the whole collective they 

collaborated to tum out such a milkmaid, they filled her cow's 

manger with high-protein feeds and even sugar. And the whole 

village and. the whole collective farm knew what that agricultural 

fair was worth. But up above they were playacting, kidding themselves--which 

means this was what they wanted. 

When the front approached Naro-Fominsk, Prokhorov was 

8. This expression "on tiptoe"-"na tsyr1akb"-is explained in Chapter 19,


entrusted with evacuating the village soviet's cattle. But this measure, 

when you get down to it, was aimed not at the Germans 

but against the peasants themselves; they were the ones left behind 

on the bare earth without cattle or tractors .. The peasants 

didn't want to hand their cattle over and fought back. (They were 

hoping the collective farms wQuld fall apart and the cattle would 

then come to them.) And they nearly killed Prokhorov. 

The fron.t rolled past their village-:-and settled down for the 

whole winter. An artilleryman from way back in 1914, Prokhorov, 

without cattle and as a last resort. joined up 'with a Soviet 

artillery battery and carried shells until they drove him away. 

In the spring of 1942 Soviet power returned to their district 

and Prokhorov again became the chairman of the village soviet. 

By now he had acquired the full power to settle accounts with 

his enemies and to become a worse cur than before. And he 

would have prospered to this day. But--strangely-he did not. 

His heart had been shaken. 

Their locality was desolated, and they gave the chairman 

bread coupons: to provide a bit from the bakery for those whose 

homes had burned down and those who were close to starvation: . 

Prokhorov, however, began to take pity on the people, .and disobeyed 

orders by overspending coupons, and got imprisoned 

under the Jaw of "Seven-eighths"-for ten years. They had forgiven 

him MacDonald because of his lack of learning, but they 

did not forgive him human mercy. 

Prokhorov, too, liked to lie there in the room for hours at a 

time, just like Orachevsky, with his boots on the foot rail of his 

cot, looking at the peeling ceiling. He only spoke up when the 

generals weren't present. I was fascinated by some of his judgments 

and expressions: 

"What kind of line is harder to draw--one straight or one 

crooked? For a straight line you have to have instruments, while 

even a drunk can draw a crooked line with his foot. So it is with 

the line of life." 

"Money-nowadays has two stories." (How apt that was! 

Prokhorov was referring to.the way foodstuffs were bought from 

the collective farm at one priCI: and sold to people at quite a 

different price. But he saw this on a broader plane too. The "two 

stories" of money are apparent in many areas; this permeates 

- our whole life. The state pays us. money on the first floor, and we 

have to-payout money everywhere on the seCond floor, and what. 


that means is that we ourselves also have to collect somewhere . 

on the. second floor, since otherwise you'd go quickly bust.) 

"A human being is not a devil, but he won't let you live," was 

another of his proverbs. 

And there was much else in the same spirit, and I very much 

regret that I failed to pr~rve it all. 

I called this room a chamber of monstrosities, but I could not 

have classified either Prokhorov or Orachevsky as a monstrosity. 

However, out of six there was a majority of monstrosities because 

what was I myself if not a monstrosity? Scraps and snatches of 

tangled-up beliefs, false hopes, IJlld imaginary convictions still 

floated about in my head, even though they were already t~tered 

and torn.· And though I 'Yas already entering on ttie second year 

of my term, I still did not understand the finger of fate, nor what 

it was pointing out to me, thrust out there onto the Archi~lago. 

I was still under the influence of the first superficial and corrupting 

thought instilled in me by that special-assignment prisoner at 

Krasnaya Presnya: "Just don't get into general workl Survive!" 

Inward development in the direction of general work came to me 

with great difficulty. 

One night a passenger car came to ~e gatehouse, and a jailer 

entered our room, shook General Belyayev by the shoulder, and 

ordered him to accompany him "with his things." Th!=y led out 

the gel\eral, who was still dazed from having been suddenly awakened. 

He managed to send us a note from the . Butyrki: "Don't 

lose heard" (Evidently he meant because of his departure.) "If 

liun alive, I will write." (He did not write, but we found out 

about· him elsewhere. They evidently considered him dangerous 

in a Moscow camp. He was sent to PotIna. There were no thermos 

jugs with homemade soup there, and I rather imagine he no longer 

cut off the outside of his bread ration on six sides. And half a year 

later we heard rumors that he had sunk very low in PotIna, that 

he was distributing gruel so as to get a sip now and then. I do not 

wo~ whether this is true. As they say in camp: I sell it to you for 

what I paid for it.) 

And so, losing no time, the very next morning I got myself the 

job of assistant norm setter in the general's place, still without 

having learned painting. But I didn't learn norm setting either, 

but only multiplied and divided to my heart's content. In the 

course of my new work I had occasion to go roaming about the 

whole construction site and time to sit on the ceiling of the eighth 

'3>


floor of our building, in other words, as if on the roof. And from 

there we prisoners had a panoramic view of Moscow. 

On one side were the Sparrow Hills,· still open and clear. The 

future Lenin Prospekt had just been projected !lD-d outlined but 

did not exist. The insane asylum-''Kanatchikova dacha"-could 

be seen in its pristine, original state. In the opposite direction were 

the cupola of the Novodevichi Monastery, the carcass, of the 

Frunze Academy, and in a violet haze far, far ahead, beyond the 

bustling streets, was the Kremlin, where all they had to do was 

merely sign that amnesty which had already been, prepared for 

us. We, the doomed, were tempted by the sight of this world which 

in its riches and glory was virtually at our feet,' yet at the same 

time forever unattainable. 

But no.matter how much of a greenhorn I was in champing at 

the bit to be out "in freedom," this city did not arouse in me envy 

or the wish to soar down onto its streets. All the evil holding us 

prisoner had been woven here. This arrogant city had never before 

provided such a justification as it did now after the war for the 

saying: 

' 

"Moscow turns ~ts back on tears! .... 

9. And now, from 'time to time, I take advantage of this opportunity-a 

rare for a former zek-to visit his own camp. Each time I am excited and 

nervous. It is so useful for measuring the relative dimensions of lifo-to immerse 

oneself in the inescapable past, to feel again wluu one was belore. Where 

the mess hall. the stage, and the Cultural and Educational Section were be-, 

fore, the "Spartak Store"·is now. Righf1here at the surviving trolleybus stop was 

the external gatehouse. Right there on the third floor is the. window of our 

chamber of monstrosities. Right there was the line-up line. -Right there Napolnaya's 

turret crane used to rise. Over there was where M. flitted over to 801' 

shader. Along the asphalt courtyard people walk, promenade, talk about petty 

things. They do not know they are walking on corpses, on our recollections. 

They could not imagine that this courtyard might once have not been part of 

Moscow, twenty minutes' drive from the center, but a tiny islet of the savage 

Archipelago, more closely tied to Norilsk and the Kolyma than to Moscow; 

But I cannot now go up on the roof where we used to go freely and I cannot 

now enter thOse a~nts in which I used to putty doors and lay floors. I 

put my hands behmd my back as I used to do and I pace back and forth in 

the compound, imagining that I cannot leave here, that I can pace only from 

here to there and back again, and that I do not know where they will send me 

tomorrow. And those asme trees in the Neskucbny Park, no longer fenced off 

by the compound fence, testify to me that they remember it all, that they remember 

me too, and that that is really how it was. . 

I pace in a prisoner's straight back-and-forth, with turns at each end, and as 

I do so aU the complexities of life todal! gradually begin to melt away ~ 

wax. 

1 cannot restrain myself, I play the hooligan: I climb up the stairs and on a 

white windowsill, half a flight below the ,office of the camp chief, I write in 

bljlCk: "Camp Sector 121." People will pass this way and read it--and perhaps 

. they will ponder lL 


• 

Although we were trustiel!. we were work trusties and our room 

wasn't the main room-up above us there was another one just 

like it where the compound trusties lived, and whence the triumvirate 

of the bookkeeper Solomonov, the stock clerk Bershader, 

and the work assigner Burshtein ruled our camp. Right there the 

reorganization was decided on: Pavlov to be removed from his 

position as works manager and. replaced by K. And so one day 

this new prime minister came to live in our room. (And just before 

that Pravdin, despite all his attempts to curry favor, had been 

hauled off on a prisoner transport.) They didn't suffer me around 

much longer; they kicked me out of norm-setting work and out 

of that room as well. (In camp when you fall in social position, 

you rise to the upper level on a multiple bunk.) But while I was 

still there I had time to observe K., who filled out our small' 

''model" not at all badly with one additional important postrevolu-, 

tionary variety of the intellectual. 

Aleksandr Fyodorovich K., a thirty-five-year-old calculating 

and grasping businessman (in other words, "a brilliant organizer"). 

was a construction engineer by profession. (But'somehow 

he showed very little professional skill and merely fussed about 

with a slide rule.) He had received ten years under the terms of 

the law of August 7, had already served three years, had thoroughly 

oriented himself in camp. and felt himself as free and easy 

here as out in freedom. It was as if general work did not threaten 

him in the least. All the less, therefore, was he inclined to take 

pity on the untalented masses doomed precisely to this general 

work. He was one of those prisoners whose actions put more fear 

into the zeks than the actions of· the Archipelago'S inveterate 

bOS$es; once he had grabbed you by the throat he would never let 

go or relax his grip. He got reduction of rations (by increasing the 

differentials), deprivation of visits fro~ relatives, and dispatch of 

more prisoners out on transports-anything to squeeze more out 

of the prisoners. Both the camp and the construction were equally 

delighted with him. '., 

But here was what was interesting: All those devices were 

clearly and obviously methods predatiDg· camp. That is how he 

had learned to lead out in freedom, and it turned out that his 

do~em of leadership was exactly what was wanted in the camps.

The Trusties . J 289 

Similarities aid cognition. I soon noticed that K. reminded me 

very much of someone else. Of whom? Of Leonid ~v, my 

Lubyanka cellmate! Not at ·all primarily in external appearance, 

not at all, for Z. had been boarlike, and K. was tall, slim, and 

gentlemanly. But, juxtaposed, they enabled me to perceive 

through them a whole generation-that first wave of the new 

engineers who had' been awaited impatiently so that the' old 

"spetsy"-specialisis--:-could be thrown out of their jobs and be, 

mapy of them, repressed.-And they had arrived, first graduates of 

the new Soviet higher technical education institutions! As engineers 

they could not hold a candle to the engineers of the older 

generation-either in the breadth of their technical education or 

in their artistic sensitivity and love for their work. (Even in comparison 

with tbe bear Orachevsky, evicted from the room right 

off, the resplendent K. immediately turned out to be an empty 

chatterbox.) As claimants to a general culture they were comic. 

(K. said: "My favorite work is Three Colors of Time by Stendhal."· 

Though .dealing hesitantly with the integral x'dx, he 

plunged right into arguments with me on any question of higher 

mllthematics. He had memorized five to ten school phrases in 

German, and used them whether they were appropriate or not. He 

did not know English at all, but· stubbornly argued 'about correct 

English pronunciation, -which he had once heard in a restaurant. 

He had a notebook with aphorisms. He often used to browse 

through it and learn phrases by heart, so as to be able to shine on 

-the right occasion.) 

But despite all this, one would have expected from them, who 

had never seen the capitalist past, who had been in no possible 

way inf~ by its ulcers, a republican purity, our own Soviet. 

fidelity to pfinciples. Many of them had received high positions 

and very high salaries straight from the school desk; and during 

the war the Motherland had excused them from the front and had 

demanded nothiJJ.g in return beyond the use of their professional 

skills. And because of this they were patriots, though they joined 

the Party with no enthusiasm. What they had never experienced 

was the fear of class-based accusations, and therefore they were 

not afraid of overstepping in their decisions, and on occasion they 

defended these decisions by shouting. For the same reason they 

were not shy in the face of the working masses and, on the contrary, 

they kept a common cruel, resolute grip on them. 

And that was all. And in accoidance with their possibilities 


they tried. to keep their working day limited to eight hours. And 

afterward the cup of life began: actresses, the Hotel Metropole, 

the Hotel Savoy. And from here on the stories of K. and Z. were 

astonishingly alike. Here is K's account of an ordinary Sunday in 

the summer of 1943 (not without exaggeration, but in the main 

correct, and you believed him right off too!). Telling us about 

it he grew quite radiant 

"Saturday eveniDg we used to roll off to the Prague Restaurant. 

Dinner! Do you understand what dinner is for a woman? Fo~ a 

woman it is absolutely unimportant what she had for breakfast or 

luncheon or what kind of work she does during the day. What's 

. important for her is: her dress, her shoes, and her dinner! At the 

Prague there was a blackout, but you could go up on the roof 

anyway. There was a bru.ustrade! The aromatic summer air! The 

Arbat down below, sleepy and blacked out. Next to you a woman 

in a silk [he would always stress that word] dress. We have 

caroused the whole night long. And now we are drinking only 

champagne! From behind the spires of the Defense Ministry a 

crimson sun floats up! Sunlight, windowpanes, roofs! We pay the 

bill. My personal car waits at the exit. It had been summoned py 

phone! The wind pours through the open car windows and refreshes 

us. At the dacha, the pine woods! Do you understand what 

a pine forest is like in the morning? Several hpurs of sleep behind 

closed shutters. We wake about ten-with the sun trying to break 

in through the Venetian blinds. All around the room is the lovely 

disorder of women's clothes. A light breakfast (do you understand 

what light means?) with red wine on the veranda. And then 

friends drop in-the river, sunning, bathing. And in the evening 

off by car to our respective homes. H it is a working Sunday, then 

after breakfast round about eleven you have to go off to give a 

few O{ders." . 

Now can the two of us ever, ever understand each other? 

He sits there on my cot and tells his story, waving his hands for 

greater accuracy in the entrancing details, twisting his head in 

the burning voluptuousness of recollection. And I remember one 

after another those fearsome Sundays of the summer of 1943. 

1uly 4. At dawn the whole earth shook to the left of us on the 

Kursk arc. And the crimson sun provided the light for us to read 

the falling leaflets: "Surrender! You have more than once experienced 

the crushing strength of the German attacks."


July 11. At dawn thousands of whistles cut through the air 

above us-oiJr own attack on Orel has begun. 

"A light breakfast?" Of course I understand. It is still dark in 

the trenches, and one can of American pork stew for eight men, 

and then-"Hurrah! For the Motherland! For Stalin!" andover 

the top. 

Chapter 10 

• 

In,Place of Politicals 

.. 

But in that grim world where everyone gnawed up whomever 

he could, where a human's life and conscience were bought for 

a ration of soggy bread-in that world who and where were the 

politicals, bearers of the hono~ and the torch of all the prison 

populations of history? 

We have already traced how the original "politicals" were 

divided, stifled, and exterminated. 

And in theirplace? . 

Well-what did take their place? Since then we have· had no 

politicals. And we could not possibly have any. What kind of 

''politicals'' could we have if universal justice had been established? 

Once upon a time in the Tsarist prisons we put to good use 

the special privileges of the politicals, and, as a result, came to 

realize all the more clearly that they had to be abolished. They 

simply . . . abolished the politicals. There are none, and there 

won't be any. 

And as for those who were imprisoned, well, they were KR's, 

enemies of the Revolution. As the years passed, the word "revolution" 

itself faded. Veri well then, let them be "e~emies o~ the 

people." That sounded even better. (If, basing ourselves on our 

review of the Waves, we count the numbers imprisoned under this 

article, and add three times that number for the members of their 

families-banished, suspected, humiliated, and persecuted-then 

we shall be forced to admit to our QStonishment that for the first 

time in history the people had become its own enemy, though in· 

return it acquired the best of friends-the secret police.) 

> .

In Place of Politicals 293 

There is a famous camp anecdote about a sentenced :woman 

who for a long time could not get through her head why the 

prosecutor and judge at her trial had kept calling her "konny 

militsioner" (a mounted policeman), which W!lS what she understood 

of "kontr-revolyutsioner" (a counterrevolutionary)! As 

one who h~ served time in camps and looked about, I can see 

this anecdote as fact. 

A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on 

the wall so it wouldn'l: get lost and happened to stick it in the eye 

of a portrait of Kaganovich. A customer observed this: Article 

58, ten years (terrorism). 

A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder noted 

it down on a sheet of newspaper. There was no other paper.-The 

number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of 

Comrade Stalin. Article 58, ten years. 

A tractor driver of the Znamenka Machinery and Tractor Station 

lined his thin shoes for warmth with a pamphlet about the 

candidate for elections to the Supreme Soviet. but a charwoman 

noticed it was missing (she was responsible for the leaflets) and 

found out who had it. KRA-Counter-Revolutionary Agitation- 

ten years., 

The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a 

bust of Comrade Stalin, They bought it. The bust was big and 

heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow, both of 

them together, but the manager's status did not allow him to. "All 

right. you'll manage it if you take it slowly." And he went off 

ahead. The old watchman couldn't work out how to do it for a 

long time. If he tried to carry it at his side; he couldn't get his arm 

around it. If he tried to carry it in froilt of him, his. back hurt and 

he was thrown off balance backward. Finally he figured out how 

to do it. He took off his belt. made a noose for Comrade Stalin, 

put it around his neck, and in this way carri,ed it over his shoulder 

through the village. Well, there was nothing here to argue about. 

It was an open-and-shut case. Article 58-8, terrorism, ten years. 

A sailor sold an Englishman a ''Katyusha'' cigarette lighter-a 

wick in a piece of pipe with a striking wheel-as a souvenir for 

one pound sterling. Subversion of the Motherland's dignity-58, 

ten years. 

A shepherd in a fit of anger swore at a cow for not obeying: 

"You collective-farm wh--!" And he got 58, and a term. 

294 I THE GULAG AltCHIPELAGO 

Ellochka Svirskaya sang a ditty at an llm.ateur concert which 

just barely touched on something sensitive. And this was open 

rebellion! 58, ten years . 

. A deaf and dumb carpenter got a term for counterrevolutionary 

agitation! How? He was laying floors in a club. Everythit).g had 

been removed from a big hall, and there was no nail or hook anywhere. 

While he was working, he hung his jacket and his service 

cap on a bust of Lenin. Someone came in and saw it. 58, ten years. 

How many of them there were in Volgolag before the war-illiterate 

old villagers from Tula, Kaluga, and Smolensk provinces. 

They all had Article 58-10, in other words, anti-Soviet propaganda. 

Because, when they had to sign, they made their mark 

with a cross. (This is Loshchilin's story.) 

After the war I did time in camp with a man from Vetluga 

named Maksimov. He had served from the beginning of the war 

in an antiaircraft battery. During the winter their political commissar 

had assembled them to discuss with them the Pravda lead 

editorial of January 16, 1942: "During the winter we must smash 

the German so badly that in the spring he will not be able to rise 

again." He assigned Maksimov to speak on this topic too. The 

latter said: "That's right! We have to drive him out, the baStard, 

while the storms are raging, while he has no felt boots, even 

though we ourselves have ordinary shoes on now and then. But 

in the spring it's go4tg to be worse because of his equipment." And. 

the political commissar applauded as if everything was all right. 

But then Maksimov was summoned to SMERSH and had eight 

years tied on him for ... "praising German equipment," 5 8. (And 

Maksimov's education had been one year at a village school. His 

son, a Komsomol member, came to camp from the arnlY, and 

-ordered him: "Don't write Mother you're arrested. Say you're in 

the army and they won't let you go." His wife wrote back to the 

P.O: box address: "Your class has all been released; why don't 

they let you go?" And the convoy guard looked at Maksimov, who 

was always unshaven and crestfallen, and a bit deaf in addition, 

and advised him: "So write that you've become an officer and 

that's why they are keeping you." Someone at the construction 

site once got angry at Maksimov for his deafness and stupidity, 

and cursed him out: "They spoiled Article 58 with you!") 

The children in a collective farm club got out of hand, had a 

fight, and accideritally knocked some post~r or other off the wall 

with their backs. The two eldest were sentenced under Article 58.

In Place of Politicals I 295 

(On the. basis of the Decree of 1935, children from the age of 

twelve on bad full criminal responsibility for all crimes!) They 

also sentenced the parents for baving allegedly told them to and 

sent them to do it: 

A sixteen-year-old Cbuvash schoolboy made a mistake in Russian 

in a slogan in the wall newspaper; it was not his native lan-_ 

guage. Article 58, five years. 

And in a state farm bookkeeping office the slogan bung: "Life J 

has become better; life has become more gay. (Stalin)" And 

someone added a letter in red pencil to Stalin's name, making the 

slogan read _as though life had become more gay for Stalin. They 

didn't look for the guilty party-but sentenced the entire bookkeeping 

office. 

Gesel Bernshtein and his wife, Besschastnaya, were sentenced 

to five years under 58-10 for holding. , . a spiritualist seance at 

home! The interrogator kept asking: "Who else was in on it?"l, 

Nonsensical? Fantastic? Senseless? It's not at. all meaningless. 

For that is just exactly what "terror.as a means· of persuasion" is. 

There is a proverb: ''Beat the crow and beat the raven-and in 

the end you'll get to the white swan!" Just keep beating one after 

another-anClin the end you'll hit the one you need. The primary 

meaning of mass terror lies precisely in this: even the strong arid 

well hidden who couId never be ferreted out simply will be caught 

and perish. 

And what absurd accusations weren't manufactured in order 

to provide a foundation for the arrest of random or marked iIidividuals! 

The charge against Grigory Yefimovich Generalov, from Smolensk 

Province, was that .he "used to drink heavily beCause he 

hated the Soviet government." (And actually he used to drink 

heavily because he and his wife got along badly.) He got eight 

years. 

Irina Tuchinskaya (the fiancee of Sofronitsky's son) was arrested 

while leaving church. (The intention was to arrest their 

whole family.) And she was charged with having "prl!}'ed in 

church for the death of Stalin." (Who could have heard that 

prayer?!) Terrorism! Twenty-five years! 

AIeksandr Babich was accused of "having in 1916 acted 

1. There was a rumor in camp that Gesel had been inlprisoned for "fortunetelling"-and 

the trusties used to bring him bread and tobacco and say: "Tell 

my fortune tool" , 

.296 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

against the Soviet government [I!] while serving in the~Turkish 

army." (In actual fact he had been a Russian volunteer on the 

Turkish front.) And he was additionally charged with the intent 

of turning over to the Germans in 1941 the i~breakerSadkoon 

which he was a passenger. And the sentence was: to be shot! 

(They replaced it with a ten~ruble bill and he died in camp.) . 

Sergei Stepanovich Fyodorov, an artillery enginer,~as 

charged with "wrecking by slowing, down the projects of young 

engineers." (You see, these Komsomol activists do not have any 

leisure time in which to complete their drawings.) 2 

Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Ignatovsky 

was arrested in Leningrad in 1941 and accused of having been, 

recruited by the German intelligence service when he was working 

for Zeiss in 1908! And he was supposed to have had a very 

strange assignment too: not to engage in espionage in the coming 

war (which was of courSe the center of interest of that generation 

of the intelligence services) but only in the next one! And there- 

. fore he had loyally served the Tsar in World War I, and then the 

Soviet government also, and had put into operation the only optical 

factory in the country (GOMZ), and been elected to the 

Academy of Sciences, and then at the begiruWlg of World War n 

he had been caught, rendered harmless, and shot! 

However, for the most part fantastic accusations were not really 

required There existed a very simple standardized collection of 

charges from which it was enough for the interrogator to pick 

one or two and stick them like postage stamps on an envelope: 

• Discrediting the Leader , 

• A negativ!? attitude toward the colective~farm structure 

• A negative attitude toward state loans (and what normal 

person could have had a positive attitude!) 

• A negative attitude towatd the Stalinist constitution 

.• ,A negative attitude toward whatever was the immediate, 

particular measure being caried~out by the Party 

• Sympathy for Trotsky . 

, • Friendliness toward the United States 

• Etc., etc., etc. 

2. And nonetheless this desperilte wrecker was taken straight from the 

Kresty Prison • . . to war factories as a consultant.


The pasting on of these stamps of varying value was monotonous 

work requiring no artistry whatsoever. All the interrogator 

needed was the next victim in. line, so as not to lose time. Such 

victims were selected on the basis of arrest quotas by Security 

chiefs of local administrative districts, military units, transportation 

departments, and educational institutions. And so that the 

.security chiefs did.not have to strain their brains, denunciations 

from informers came in very handy. 

In the conflicts between people in freedom, denunciations were 

the superweapon, the X-rays: it was sufficient to direct an invisible 

little ray at your enemy-and he fell. And it always worked. For 

these cases I have not recollected the names of the individuals involved, 

but I can afij.rm that I heard many stories in impriSonment 

about the use of denunciations in lovers' quarrels: a man would 

remove an unwanted husband; a wife would dispose of a mistress, 

or a mistress would dispose of a wife; or a mistress would take 

revenge on her lover because she had failed to separate him from 

his wife. 

The most frequently used postage stamp was Section 10- 

counterrevolutionary (subsequently renamed anti-Soviet) agitation. 

If our descendants should someday read the interrogation 

and trial records of Stalin's times, they will be utterly astounded 

to find what indefatigable and adroit operators those anti-Soviet 

propagandil!ts were. They were quite capable of using a needle or 

a tattered service cap for propaganda purposes, washed floors 

(see below) or unwashed linens, a smile or its absence, too expressive 

or too impenetrable a look, soundless thoughts inside the 

skull, notes in an intimate diary, love letters, graffiti in toilets. 

They propagandized on the highways and byways, at a fire, at the 

collective-farm market, in the kitchen, behind thedoniestic tea 

table, and in bed whispering in the ear. And only the invincible 

social structure of socialism could withstand such a propaganda 

assault! 

In the Archipelago they used to love to joke that not all the 

articles of the Criminal Code were accessible. One or another 

person might wish to violate the law on protection of soCialist 

property, but was not allowed near it. Some other person wouldn't 

hesitate to commit embezzlement-but could not manage to get 

a job as a cashier. To murder one had to have at least a knife; to 

possess a weapon unlawfully one first' of all. had to acquire a 

298 I THB GULAG AIlCHIPBLAG.O 

weapon. To have carnal knowledge of animals one had to have 

livestock. Even Article 58 was not so easily accessible: just how 

can you betray the Motherland under the heading of Section 1 b if 

. you don't serve in the army? How can you establish contact With 

the world bourgeoisie, under Section 4, if you live in Khanty 

Mansiisk? And how c~ you subvert state industry and transportation, 

under Section 7, if you work as a barber? If you don't 

have at least a stinking old sterilizer so it can explode (chemical 

engineer Chud~ov, arrested in 1948 for "diversionary activities")? 

. 

But Section 10 of Article 58 was universally accessible. To 

aged old. women and twelve-year-old schoolboys. To married 

and single, to pregnant women and virgins, to athletes and cripples, 

to drunk and sober, to those who Clgl see and to the blind 

too, to owners of automobiles and beggars of alms. One can earn 

one's sentence via Section 10 just as readily in the winter as in 

the SUDImer, on a weekday as on a Sunday, early morning and 

late at night, at work or at home, on a stair landing, at a Metro 

station, in a dense forest, in an intermission at the theater, or 

during the course of a solar eclipSe. 

The only other section which eould rival Section lOin its accessibility 

was Section 12-failure to make a denunciation, or 

"He knew but he didn't tell." All those same people listed above 

could receive this section and in all the same eoliditions, but the 

special advantage in this case was that one did not even have to 

open one's mouth, nor take pen in hand. The whole point of this 

section was f~ure to act! And the sentence was the same.: ten 

years of imprisonment and five years "muzzled." 

Of course, after the war Section 1 of Article 58-"treason to 

the M()therland"-~o longer seemed difficult to attain either. 

Not only all the POW's, not only all those who had been in occupied 

territories had a rightto it, but even those who had dallied 

over being evacua~d from threatened areas and who thereby disclosed 

their intent to betray the Motherland. (Professor of mathematics 

Zhuravsky asked for three plane seats out of Leningrad: 

for his wife, his sick sister-in-law, and himself. They gave him 

two, none for the sister-in-law. He sent oft' his wife and sister-inlaw 

and stayed behind. The authorities could o~y interpret this 

act to mean that the professor was waiting for the Gernians. 

Article 58-1a,via 19, ten years.)

. 'n Place of PoUticals I 299 

In comparison with those unfortUnates. described earlier--.,.the 

tailor, the club watchman, the deaf and dumb man, the sailor" 

or the man from Vetluga-here are some others whose sentences 

will seem fully justified: 

• The Estonian Enseld, who arrived in Leningrad from still 

independent Estonia, had a letter taken from him' written in Russian. 

To whom? From whom? "I am an honorable man and I 

cannot tell you." (The letter was from V. Chemov to his relatives.) 

Alta. bastard! So you are an honorable man? So off to 

Solovld with youl At least he actually did have a letter. 

• Girichevsky, the father of two front-line soldiers, got conscripted 

into peat digging during the wartime labor mobilizatiOn; 

and he criticized the watery oversalted soup there. (He actually 

did criticizel He did open his mouth!) And· quite deservedly he 

got 58-10 for this-ten years. (He died picking potato peelings 

out of the camp slops. In his dirty pocket was a photograplt of his 

son, his chest covered with medals.) 

• Nesterovsky was an English-langUage teacher who in his 

own home, over the tea table, told his wife and her best friend 

(he really did tell them!) how impoverished and hungry were 

the rear areas on the right bank of the Volga River. Her best 

friend did jn both the Nesterovskys: he got ten years under ~ 

tionJO, and she got the same under Section 12. (And what about 

their apartment? I don't know, perhaps it went to the best 

friend?) , 

• N. I. Ryabinin, in 1941" said during our retreat, said aloud 

where everyone could hear, "We should have sung ·fewer songs 

like 'Don't touch us and we won't touch you! We'll give no quarter 

if you dol' " Well, now, a scoundrel like that certainly ought to 

have been shot at the very least, but they only gave him ten years. 

• Reunov and Tretyukhin, both Communists, got as hot and 

• bothered as if a wasp had stung them on the neck because the 

Party COl!&!.ess was long overdue, and this was a violation of 

the statutes. (As if it were any of their lousy business!) They got 

ten each! 

• Faina Yefimovna Epshtein, astounded at Trotsky's criminal 

activity, asked at a Party meeting: "Why was he allowed to leave 

the U.S.S.R.?" (As if the Party was answerable to her! And maybe 

Iosif Vissarionovich was kicking himself about that!) For this 

awkward question she yldevre~ got and served out three terms 

300 \. THB GULAG AllCHIPBLAGO 

one after another. (Even though not one of the interrogators or 

prosecutors could explain to her where h,er guilt lay.) 

• And Grusha-the-Proletarian committed a crime of simply 

astounding gravity. She worked at.a glass factory for twenty-three 

. years and her neighbors had never seen an icon in her home. But 

just before the Germans got to her district she did put up some 

icons. (She had simply stopped being afraid; after all they used 

to persecute people who haciicons!) And what the interrogation 

particularly noted on the basis of the denunciation of her neighbors 

was that she had also washed her floors! (But the Germans 

never did get there.) Then, too, she had picked up near her house . 

a pretty German leaflet with a picture and pushed it into the vase 

on her dresser. And despite all this our humane court, taking into 

consideration her proletarian origins, gave Grusha only eight 

years of camp and three years of disenfranchisement. Meanwhile 

her h11l!band perished at the front. And her daughter was a student 

in the technological institute, but the cadres kept tormenting her: 

''Where is your mother?" And the girl poisoned herself. (Grusha 

could never get past the point of her daughter's death in telling 

her story. She sobbed and went out.) 

And what was Gennady Sorokin, a student in the third year 

at the Chelyabinsk Pedagogical Institute, to be given for having 

published two of his own· essays in a students' literary journal 

(1946)1 Small change, of course: ten years. 

And what about reading the poet Sergei Yesenin? After all, 

we keep forgetting everything. Soon they will be telling us that 

"this was not so; Yesenin was always a revered poet of the people." 

But Yeseninwas a counterrevolutionary poet. His verses 

were forbidden literature. M. Y. Potapova was charged as follows 

in the Ryazan State Security: "How did you dare admire Yesenin 

[before the war], if Iosif Vissarionovich said that the best and the 

most ta1en~d was Mayakovsky1 That's how your anti-Soviet nature 

showed itself." . 

And that civil aviation flier, assistant pilot of a "Douglas," 

looks like a dyed·in-the-wqol anti-Soviet. Not only did they find 

a complete collection of Yesenin in his possession, not only did 

he talk about how well-to-do and well fed people were in East 

Prussia until we got the~but during the course of a public 

debate in an aviation unit, he got into a public argument with Dya 

Ehrenburg about Gemany. (In view of Ehrenburg's position at

In Ploce of PoUticals I 301 

that time one may conclude that the pilot was proposing gentler 

treatment of the Germans.)8 At a debate-a public argument! 

Court-martial: ten yem imprisonment and five of disenfranchisement. 

1. F. Lipaicreated a collective farm-in his own local district a 

year before the bosses gave orders to create them-a completely 

voluntary collective farm! And cOuld GPU Commissioner Ovsyannikov 

allow that hostile -sally to go unchallenged? I don't 

need your good one. Give me my bad one! The collective farm 

was proclaimed to be kulak, and Lipai himself an any of the 

kulaks-aIid thoy dragged him through the hummocks .•.• 

F. V. Shavirin, a worker, spoke out loud (I) at a Party meeting 

about Lenin's testament! Well! Nothing could be worse than 

that-he had to be a sworn enemy! Whatever teeth he had managed 

to keep through the interrogatioB he lost in his first year in 

the Kolyma. _ 

See what awful criminals were to be encountered among the 

58's! And indeed some were really venomous, with a touch of 

the underground. For example, -there was Perets Gertsenberg, 

an inhabitant of Riga. All of a sudden he moved to the Lithuanian 

Socialist Republic and registered himself as being of Polish 

origin. And in fact he was a Latvian -Jew. Whafwas particularly 

su~artuo about this was the desire to deceive his own native 

state. It meant he was counting on our letting him go to Poland 

and frQIIl there he would slip off to Israel. Nothing doing, darling, 

you didn't want to stay in Riga, so off to Gulag. Betrayal of the 

Moti!erland via intention: ten years. 

_ 

And what secretive people there were about too! In -1937 

among the workers o~ the "Bolshevik" Factory (Leningrad) 

some former pupils of the trade schools were discovered who had 

been present, in 1929, at a meeting addressed by Zinoviev. (A 

list of those present had been found attached to the min]ltes.) 

. . 

3. In Ebrenburg's memoirs you will find no trace of such trlvi8l incidents. 

Anyway, he might not have knoWn that the man arguing with him had beeil 

arrested. He merely offered.a fairly standard Party-line reply at that particular 

moment and then forgot about it. Ebrenburg writes that he himself "survived 

by 10ttery.B Well, that little lottery had marked numbers. If they were rounding 

up your friends, you had to -stop phoning them in time. If the wagon shaft 

turned, it was necessary to turn too. Ehrenburg heated up hatred for the Germans 

so insanely that Stalin had to pull him up short. If you feel toward the 

end of your life that you helped establish a lie, then what is required to justify 

yourself is not memoirs but an inunediate bold self-sacrifice. 


For eight years these people had concealed themselves by SDeak~ 

ing into "the ranks of the proletariat. Now all of them were arrested 

and shot. 

Said Marx: "The state cripples itself by turning a cjtizen into 

a criminal. '>4 And very touchingly he explained how in every violator 

'of the law the state must see a warm-blooded human being 

as well; and a soldier: who defends the Fatherland, and a member 

of the community, and a father of a family, "whose existence is 

sacred," and-most importantly-a citizen. But our jurists have 

no time to read Marx, particularly such unthought-out parts as 

these. Let Marx read our instructions if he feels like it. 

People will exclaim that this whole list is what-monstrous? 

Ridiculous. That it is beyond belief? That Europe won't believe 

it? 

Europe, of course, won't believe it. Not until Europe itself 

serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy' 

magazines and can't get anything else into her head. 

But what about us? Fifty years ago we would not have believed 

it either for anything. And one hundred years ago we 

would not have believed it. Belinsky, Chernyshevsky-they 

would not have believed it. But if we ~g down three or four 

spades deep, back to Peter the. Great and, before-why shouldn't 

we believe it? What's so bad, about that? It has been going on 

since time immemorial: 

• The prisop watChman Senka spoke: "Don't. pull my beard! 

I'm a peasant who belongs to the state-but does that mean my 

beard belongs to the state too?" (Article 58-to be flogged with 

cudgels without mercy.) 

• The Streltsy junior officer Ivashko Raspopin gestured with 

his finger and announced: "That's what you can do with your 

sovereign." (58-to be flogged with cudgels Without mercy.) 

• The tradesman Blestin, cursing out the Cossacks, said: 

"The great prince is stupid to give food' and drink to you Cossacks." 

(Article 58-to be flogged with cudgels without mercy.) 

• The. knight Ivan Pashkov said: "Th~ Sovereign-Tsar is 

higher than Saint Athana"Sius.'~ And the sacristan of the Church 

of Saint Athanasius, Nezhdan, said: "Then why does the Tsar 

pray_to Athanasius?" This was in Holy Week and both were 

4. ~arx and Engels, op. ~it., Vol. I, p. '233.

In Place of Politicqis I 303 

dnmk. Moscow delivered its verdict without prejudice: the boyar's 

son must be ftogged with· cudge1swithout mercy, and ~ 

sacristan ftogged for the same reason.' 

At the very least everyone keeps his mouth shut. And that is _. 

what is needed • 

• 

In the former Russia the politicaIs and the philistines were-two 

opposite extremes· in the population. It was impossible to fuid 

more mutually· exclusive ways of life and ways of thinking. 

. In the U.S.S.R. they began to rake in the philistines as "politicals." 

And as a result the politicals were equated with the philistines. 

Half the Archipelago consisted of the 58's. And there weren't 

any . . . politicals. (If there bad been that many real politicaIs, 

the government would long since have been sitting on Ii different 

bench in the courtroom!) 

Into this Article 58 were thrown an those fot whom no criminal 

article had been chosen right off. It contained an unimaginable 

medley and motley.' To put a person into 58 was the sim-. 

plest of all methods of getting rid of bini, to remove him quioIdy 

and forever. . . 

And in addition ju'st plain family members went into this 

classification, especially the ChS wives. Today it is weIl known 

that the wives of important Party leaders were arrested as CbS's 

-members of .families. But this custom had been established 

earlier. That was how they purged the families of the nobility as 

s. These examples are taken from· P1ekhanov's book Istoriya Russkol 06- 

shchestvenn()i Mysli (A History of Russian Sociol Thought). 

6. For . example, a young American who married a Soviet girl and was arrested 

the first night spent outside the American EmbusY (Morris Gershman). 

Or a former Siberian partisan, Muravyov. famous for his reprisals agaiust 

the Whites (vengeance for his brother), never got out of the GPU from 1930 

on (it had begun because of gold) and in the end he lost his health, his teeth, 

his mind, and even his name (he became Fob). Or the Soviet quartermaster 

caught embezzling who led from criminal prosecution into the WestemZ!lne 

of Austria. But When ·he got there-and here's a langhl---he could not find employment. 

Stupid bureaucrat that he was, he wanted a high-ranking position 

there, but how could he get one in a society in which talents cOmpete? So he 

decided to return to the Motherland. Here he received twenty-five yeara for 

the .combined offenses of theft and suspected espionage. And glad was he: 

here he could breathe more freelyl 

Such examples are innnmerable. 

'- 


well, and the families of prominent intellectuals, and clerics. 

(And even in the fifties: the historian Kh-tsev received 

twenty-five years for committing ideological errors in his book. 

But shouldn't his wife,.get her sentence too? Ten years. But why 

leave out his old mother, aged seve~ty-five, and his sixteen-yearold 

daughter? Both got sentences for failure to inform on him. 

And all four were sent off '0 different,camps without the right to 

correspond with one another.) 

And the more peaceful, quiet, and even illiterate people, remote 

from· politics, the more people occupied only with their 

own daily round before their arrest who were drawn into the 

maelstrom of undeserved punishment and death, the more gray 

and timid became Article 58. Stripped gradually of its last political 

sense, it turned into a lost herd~of lost people. 

But it isn't enough to say who made up Article 58. It is more 

important to know how the 58's were treated in camp. 

From the first years of the Revolution on, this group was cut 

off on all sides: by the prison regimen and by juridical formulations. 

,,\ 

If we take Cheka Order No. 10 of January 8, 1921; we learn 

there that only a worker or a peasant could not be arrested 

without convincing prOQfs-which means that an intellectual 

could be, say, just out of antipathy. Or if we listen to Krylenko 

at the Fifth Congress of Justice Workers in 1924, we learn that 

"in regard to convicted Mstile-class elements . . . correction is 

impotent and purposeless." At the beginning of the thirties they 

remind us once more that shortening the tertns of hostile-class 

elements is a right-opportunist practice. And it is also "an opportunist 

directive that held that 'in prison all are equal,' that from 

the moment of sentencing the class struggle somehow ceases to 

exist," that "the class enemy is beginning to 'be. corrected.'''T 

If we pull all of that 'together, then here's what: you can be 

arrested for nothing:, and it is purposeless to try to correct you; 

and in camp we will put you in an oppressed position and finish 

you off there with class struggle. 

But how are we to Ul~erstand that the class struggle continues 

even in camp? After all, it's true, isn't it, that all prisoners 

are sort of equal. ,Hut no, don't be in such a hurry, that's a 

7. Vyshinsky, op. cit., p. 384.

In Place oj Politicals I 305 

bourgeois concept! The whole reason they deprived the politicalS 

of the right to be held apart from the nonpolitical criminals was 

so as to have the criminals on their backs! (This was devised, too, 

by people who had come to understand in Tsarist prisons the 

strength of possible political unity, of political protest, and its 

dangers for the regime.) 

Yes, here is Averbakh; Johnny-on-the-spot again, to explain 

to us: "The tactic of re-education is based on class differentiation 

. . . is based on the strata friendliest to the proletariat"8 (and 

who are these friendly prisoners? They are "former workers," 

i.e., thieves, and they are the ones to be sicked on the 58's). 

"Re-education is impossible without- kindling political passions" 

(and this is a literal quotation!). 

And so when our lives were put wholly in the power of the 

-thieves, this was no simple caprice on the part of lazy chiefs in 

remote camps, it was the exalted Theory! 

"The class-differentiated approach to the regimen . . . incessant 

administrative _pressure on hostile-class elements. " Yes, 

dragging out your endless sentence, in -your tattered padded 

jacket, with head bowed-can you even imagine this: incessant 

administrative pressure on you?! 

And we can even read in that same remarkable book a list 

of methods for creating unbearable conditions for the 58's in 

camp. All you have to do, it says, is reduce the number of -visits, 

parcels, correspondence, the right to complain, the right to move 

about within (!)- the camp. And, it says, you have to create separate 

brigades of the hostile-class elements and put them in more 

difficult situations (I elucidate on my own: this means cheat 

them in measuring the work performed)-and then when they 

/ fail to fulfill the norm, declare this to be a sally of the class enemy. 

(Hence- the Kolyma executions of entire brigades!) And 

then it gives frequent creative advice: The kulaks and their supporters 

(i.e., the best peasants imprisoned in the camps, tHose 

who even in their dreams used to yearn for peasants' work) were 

not to be assigned to agricultural work! And it also says: the 

highly skilled hostile-class element (in other words, the engineers) 

were not to be entrusted with any responsible work "without 

a preliminary verification." {But who is there in camp suf- 

8. Averbakh. op. cit .• p. 35. 


ficiently qualified to verify the engineers? EVidently the thieves' 

light cavalry from the Cultural and Educational Section, something 

like the Chinese Communist Red G.uards.) It was difficult 

to act on this advice-on the canals; after all, locks do not design 

themselves, the canal doesn't dig itself; so then Averbakh simply 

begged: let the specialists spend their first six months in camp at 

least on general work. (That's all it took to die!) In that case, 

presumably, through not living in a privileged intellectual barracks, 

"they will experience the pressure of the collective"; "the 

counterrevolutionaries will· see that the masses are against them . 

and despise them." 

And how convenient it is, having mastered class ideology, to 

tum everything that takes place inside out. What if someone 

fixes up "former" top peoplt: and intellectuals with trusty jobs? 

Then it goes without saying that he "is giving the heaviest work 

to inmates from among the working class." What if a former 

officer is working in the storeroom, and there isn't enough clothing? 

Then it goes without saying that he is "deliberately holding 

it back." What if someone says to the shock-work record holders: 

"The others are not keeping pace with you~'? Then it goes 

without saying that he is a class enemy! What if a thief gets 

drunk, or escapes, or steals? Then explain to him that it was not 

he who was guilty, that it was the class enemy who made him 

drunk, or taught him to escape, or taught him to steal (an intellectual 

teaching a thief how to steall-and this was written quite 

seriously in 1936!). And if "the hostile element itself is turning 

in good work performances," he is "doing this for purposes of 

camouflage." 

. The circle is closed! Whether you work or whether you d~n't. 

Whether you love us or whether you don't. We hate you and will 

annihilate you with the hands of the thieves! 

And so it is that Pyotr Nikolayevich Ptitsyn (imprisoned as a 

58) sighs: "Well, you see the real criminals are incapable of 

genuine labor. It is actually the innocent person who sacrifices 

himself totally, to the last breath. There is the drama: the enemy 

of the people is the friend of the people." 

But-nobody needs your sacrifice. 

"An innocent person!" That is the main sensation of those 

ersatz politicals rounded up and put into camps. In all probability 

this was an ·unprecedented event in world prison history: 

when millions of prisoners realize that they are right, all of them

In Place of Politieals I 307 

right, and that no one is guilty. (Only one innocent was imprisoned 

at hard labor with Dostoyevsky.) 

~ However, these crowds of chance people, chased behind barbed 

wire not in conformity with their convictions but by a thrust of 

fate, were by no means strengthened by the consciousness of 

their own rightness. Perhaps it even oppressed them more by 

emphasizing the absurdity of their situation. Clinging more to 

their former way of life than to any convictions whatever, they 

in no way manifested readiness for sacrifice, unity, or fighting 

spirit. While still in prison, entire cells allowed themselves to be 

plundered by two or three snotty thieves. By the time they got to 

the camps they were already totally demoralized. All they were 

prepared to do was to bend their backs beneath the cudgels of 

the work assigner and the thief, beneath the fist of the brigadier, 

and all they re~ained capable of was mastering the camp philosophy 

(disunity, everyone for himself, and mutual deceit) and 

the camp language. 

When she arrived in a general camp in 1938, Y. Olitskaya 

looked on all those 58's with astonishment, with the eyes of a 

socialist who had knownSolovki and the isolators. Once, in her 

own recollection, the politicals shared everything, but now each 

one lived and chewed only for himself, and even the "politicals" 

traded clothes and rations! 

Political riffraff-that's what Anna Skripnikova called them 

(us). Back in 1925 she herself had learned that lesson: she complained 

to the interrogator that her cellmates were being dragged 

by their hair by the Lubyanka Prison chief. The interrogator 

laughed and asked her: "Is he dragging you too?" "No, but my 

comrades!" And he exclaimed in deadly earnest: "Aha, how 

frightening it is that you protest! Drop all those useless airs of 

the Russian intelig~ntsia! They are out of date! Worry about 

yourself only! Otherwise, you're in for a hard time." 

And this is exactly the thieves' principle: If they're not raking 

you in, then don't lie down and ask for it. * The Lubyanka interrogator 

in. 1925 already possessed the thieves' philosophy. 

And so to the question which sounds so outlandish to the educated 

public: "Can a political steal?" we simply have-to counter 

with astonishment: "And why not?" 

"Is he capable of informing?" "What makes him any worse 

than the others?" 

And when people naively protest to me about Ivan Denisovich: 


"How is it that the politicals in your book express themselves in 

thieves' jargon?" I have to reply: "And what if there is no other 

language in the Archipelago? Do you really expect political riffraff 

to counterpose a language of their own to that of the criminal 

riffraff?" 

They drum into them day and night that they are criminals, 

and the most lieinous of all criminals, and that those who are not 

criminals are not imprisoned in our country! 

They broke the back of the 58's-and there were no politicals. 

Having poured them into the pigs' trough of the Archipelago, 

they drove them to die at work and shouted into their ears the 

camp lie that each was an enemy of the other. 

The proverb says: "When hunger takes hold, the voice will 

. appear." But among us, among our natives, it did not. Even 

from hunger: 

And yet how little, how very little; they needed to be saved! 

Just one thing: not to cling to life, which was already lost apyway, 

and ... to rally together. 

This took place with success sometimes among entire foreign 

groups, for example, the Japanese. In 1947, at Revuchi, the 

penalty camp for the Krasnoyarsk camps, they brought in about 

forty Japanese officers, so-called "war·criminals." (Though one 

could not even imagine what they were guilty of in relation to 

us.) It was bitterly cold. There was logging, unbearable even for 

Russians. The otritsalovka-"the band of rejecters~'9-swiftly 

elot~ the clothes from sollie of them and swiped the whole tray 

with their bread several times. The Japanese, in dismay, waited 

for the chiefs to intervene, .but the chiefs, of {;ourse, paid no at 

.noit~et Then their brigadier, Colonel Kondo, accompanied by 

two senior officers, went one evening to the office of the camp 

chief and warned him (they knew Russian very well) that if the 

violence against them did not stop, two officers who had announced 

their desire to do so would commit hara-kiri at dawn the 

next morning. And this would be only the beginning. The chief 

of the camp (the blockhead Yegorov, former political commissar 

of a regiment) immediately sensed that he could very easily 

come to a bad end because of this. For two days the Japanese 

9. The members of the "otritsalovka" took the position: "I reject everything 

the chiefs demand of me-both the regimen and the work." Customarily this 

was a powerful nucleus of thieves.


brigade was not taken out to work, was fed normally, and then 

taken off the penalty regimen. 

How little was required for struggle and victory-mere!l not 

to cliIig to life! A life that was in any case already lost . 

.But our 58's were kept constantly mixed with the thieves and 

the nonpolitical offenders and were never allowed to be alone together-so 

they wouldn't look into one another's eyes and realize: 

who we are. And those bright heads, hot tonguC;S, and firm 

hearts who might have become prison and camp leaders-had all, 

on th~ baSis of special notations in their file'l', been culled' out, 

gagged, arid hidden away in special isolators and shot in oellars • 

• 

However, in ac~ordance with that important phenomenon of life 

noted already in the teachings of Taoism, we were bound to expect 

that the moment the politicals ceased to exist was also the very 

moment when they ap~ed. 

I will risk declaring that in the Soviet period not only were 

there genuine politicals, but also that: 

1. There were more of tnem than In Tsarist times,and 

2. They manifested more steadfastness and courage than did 

the earlier revolutionaries. 

This seems to ,contradict the preceding, but it does not. The 

politicals in Tsarist Russia were in a very favorable situation,' 

very much in the public eye-producing immediate repercussions 

in society and the press. And we have already seen (in Part I,' 

Chapter 12) that in Soviet Russia the socialists had things incomparably 

more difficult. 

And not only socialists were now politicals. The politicals were 

splashed in tubfuls into the fifteen-million-criminal ocean, and 

they were invisible and inaudible to us. They were mute. They . 

were muter than all the rest. Their image was the fish. 

The fish, symbol of the early Christians. And the Christians 

were their principal contingent. Clumsy, semiliterate, unable to 

deliver speeches from the rostrum or compose an underground 

procl1Ul1ation (which their faith made unnecessary. anyway), they 

went off to camp to face tortures and death--only so as not to 


renounce their faith! They knew very well for what they were 

gnivre~ time, and they were unwavering in their convictions! They 

were,the only ones, perhaps, to whom the· camp philosophy and 

even the camp language did not stick. And were these not politicals? 

Well, you'd certainly not call them riffraff . 

. And women among them were particularly numerous. The 

Tao says: When faith collapses, that is when the true believers 

appear. Because of our enlightened scoffing at Orthodox priests, 

the squalling of the Komsomol members on Easter night, * and 

the whist1~ of the" thieves at the transit prisons, we overlooked 

the fact that the sinful Orthodox Church had nonetheless nurtured 

daughters worthy of the first centuries of Christianitysisters 

of those thrown to the lions in the arenas. 

There was a multitude of Christians: prisoner transports and 

graveyards, prisoner transports and graveyards. Who will count 

those millions? They died unknown, casting only in their immediate 

vicinity a light like a candle. They were the best of Russia's 

Christians. The worst had all . . . trembled, recanted, and gone 

into hiding. " 

Is this not more? Was there ever a time when Tsarist Russia 

had known that many politicaIs? Tsarist Russia could not even 

count them in tens of thousands. 

But so cleanly, so unwitnessed was the strangling of our politicaIs, 

that it is only rarely that the story of one or another surfaces 

for us. 

Archpriest Preobrazhensky (the face of a Tolstoi, a gray 

beard). Prison, exile, camp, prison, exile, camp (the Big Solitaire). 

After being worn down in this way for many, many. years, 

"in 1943 he was summoned to the Lubyanka-and on the way 

there the thieves stole his tall cylindrical priest's hat. It was 

proposed to him that he become a member of the Synod. It would 

seem thilt after so many years he might have allowed himself some 

respite from prison? But no, he refused: it was not a pure synod, 

not a pure church. And-back to camp. 

And what about Valentin" Feliksovich Voino-Yasenetsky 

(1877-1961), Archbishop Luke, and.author of the famous work 

Purulent Surgery? His biography will, of course, be compiled, 

and it is not for us to write about him here. This man abounded 

in talent. Before the Revolution he had already successfully competed 

for entry into the Academy of Arts, but had left it in order

In Place of PoUticals I 311 

to serve humanity better-as a physician. In the hospitals of 

World War I he emerged as an expert eye surgeon, and after the 

Revolution he headed a Tashkent clinic, extremely popular in 

all Central Asia. A smooth and untroubled career was spread 

out before him, like the paths trod by our highly successful contemporaries. 

But Voino-Yasenetsky sensed that his service was 

insufficient, and he put on the robes of a priest. He hung an icon 

in his operating room and delivered his lectures to his students 

we8ring clerical robes and with a cross around his neck (1921). 

Patriarch Tikhon managed to appoint him Bishop of Tashkent. 

In the twenties Voino-Yasenetsky was exiled to the Turukbansky 

region, but was then brought back thanks to the exertions of 

many, but his chaD:, and his diocese had alread~ been taken. He 

had a private practice (the sign on his door reading "Bishop 

Luke"), and masses of the sick poured in to see him (the '1eather" 

coats," too, in secret), and he gave what he did not need of his 

money to the poor. 

It is worth noting how they got rid of him: He had been sent 

to hiS second exile (in Archangel in 1930) not as a 58, but ''f01"_ 

inciting to murder." (This was a nonsensical story, according to 

which he had brought influence to bear on the wife and motherin-law 

of the physiologist Mikhailovsky who committed suicide 

-and who,. when already insane, had been engaged in injecting 

into corpses solutions which had allegedly stopped the disintegration 

of tissue, about which the newspapers had made a big to-do 

as a ''triumph of Soviet science" and artificial "resurrection.") 

This administrative method compels us to take an even more 

informal approach to the question of who the real politicals were. 

H not struggle with the regime, then moral or energetic resistance 

to it-that is the chief criterion. And" the matter of which "article" 

was pasted on didn't mean ~ thing. (Many sons of the liquidated 

''kulaks'' were given thieves' articles, but in camp showed themselves 

to be genuine politicals.) 

In exile in Archangel, Voino-Yasenetsky wOrked out a new 

method of healing purulent wounds. He was summoned to Leningrad, 

and Kirov himself tried to persuade him to lay asid~ his 

priest's robC$ and immediately offered him his own institute. But 

the "stubborn bishop would not even consent to have his book 

published without an indication, in parentheses, of his clerical 

rank. And thus it was that without an institute and without his 


book he completed his exile in 1933, returned to Tashkent,and 

there was sentenced to a third term of exile, in the Krasnoyarsk: 

region. From the beginning of the war, he worked in Siberian 

hospitals, where he applied his technique of healing purulent 

wounds-and this led him to a Stalin Prize. And he only agreed 

to accept it dressed in his full bishop's regaIia. 10 

And the engineers? How many of them refused to sign stupid, 

disgusting confessions of wrecking and were scattered to the 

four winds and shot? And how Pyotr Aldmovich (Ioakimovich) 

Palchinsky (1875-1929) gleams like a bright star among them! 

He was an engineer and scholar with an astonishing breadth of 

interests. A graduate (in 1900) of the Mining Institute, an outstanding 

authority on mining, he studied and, as can be seen from 

the list of his books, reft behind him works on general questions 

of economic development, on the fluctuations of industrial prices, 

on the exPQrt of coal, on the equipment and operation of Europe's 

trading ports, on the economic probleIDS of port management, on 

industrial-safety teChniques in Germany, on concentration in the 

German and English mining industries, on the economics of 

mining, on the reconstruetion and development of the building 

materials industry in the U.S.S.R., on the general training of 

engineers in higher-education-and, in addition, works on purely 

mining subjects, such as descriptions of individual areas and individual 

ore deposits (and not all his works are yet known to us 

today). Uke Voino-Yasenetsky in medicine, Palchinsky would. 

never have come to grief in his own engineering work; but just as 

the former could not stop propagating the faith, so he could not 

stop meddling in politics. Even as a student in the Mining Institute, 

Palchinsky had been listed by the Tsarist gendarmes as a 

"leader of the movement" In 1900 he had been the chairman of 

a students' assembly. As an engineer in 1905 in Irkutsk he had 

already been prominently involved in the revolutionary uprisings, 

and in the "case of the Irkutsk Republic" he was sentenced to 

hard labor. He escaped and went off to Europe. Having already 

before this been in sympathy with the Anarchists, he became 

friendly. with Krcipotkin. He used his emigre years to perfect his 

knowledge in several engineering areas. and studied European 

10. When medical students today ask about his blolP'llphy. they receive the 

reply: "There Is no literature on him."

In' Place of Politicals I 313 

technology and economics, but at the same time he never lost 

sight of the program of popular publications "for disseminating 

Anarchist ideas among the masses." In 1913, amnestied, he returned 

to Russia and wrote to Kropotkin: "In view of the program 

of my own activities in Russia, I aim to take part ... wherever 

I am able in the general development of the productive 

forces d. the country and in the development of.spontaileous social 

and public activity in the broadest sense of this word."ll During 

his first trip through the main Russian centers, he was snowed 

under with suggestions to stand for such positions as business 

manager of the Council of the Congress of the Mining Industry, 

offered "brilliant positions in directorships in the Donbas," consultancies 

to banks, lecturer in the Mining Institute, the post of 

director of the Department of Mines. There were few men in 

Russia with such energy and such broad knowledge! 

And what was his further fate? We have already reported 

above (Part I, Chapter 10) how in World War I he became a 

Deputy Chairman of the War Industry Committee and, after the 

February Revolution, Deputy Minister pf Trade and Industry. 

As evidently the most energetic of the members of the weak-wiUed 

Provisional Government, Palchinsky was successively Govemor 

General of Petrograd during the Kornilov days12 and Chief of 

Defense of the Winter Palace during the October . Revolution. 

Immediately afterward he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul 

Fortress and serv~ four months there. Then, it's true, he was 

released. In June, 1918, he was arrested without any charges 

being made against him. On September 6, 1918, he was included 

in a list of 122 prominent hostages. ("If even one Soviet o(Jicial 

is killed, the hostages listed below will be shot. Sigiled: Petrograd 

Cheka; G. Boky, Chairman; A. Ioselevich, Secretary.")18 HC)wever, 

he was not shot, and at the end of 1918 he was even released 

because of the Inappropriate intervention of the German Social 

Democrat Karl Moor (who was astounded at the kind of people 

we were leaving to rot in prison). From 1920 on he was a professor 

at the Mining Institute, visited Kropotkin in Dmitrov, and 

after Kropotkin's death not long afterward created a committee 

1 i. Letter to Kropotkin, February 20, 1913, 'J"sGAOR, collection 1129, shelf 

2, unit 1936. 

12. BiTlhevyye Vedomosti (Stock Exchange News), August 31, 1917, and 

September 2, 1917. 

13. PetTogradskaya Pravda, September 6, 1918, No. 193. 


for the (unsuccessful) perpetuation of Kropotkin's memory-and 

soon, either because of or notwithstanding this, was again I,U' 

rested. A curious document on the release of Palchinsky from this 

third Soviet imprisonment has been preserved in the archivesa 

letter to the Moscow Revtribunal, dated January 16, 1922: 

Colisidering that the permanent consultant of the State Planning Commission, 

Engineer P. A. Palchinsky, is to deliver a report in the Southern 

Bureau on Jan. 18 of this year at 3 P.M. on the question ofrestoring 

Southern Metallurgy, which is of particularly important significance at 

the present moment, the Presidium of the State Planning Commission 

requests the Revtribunal to release Comrade Palchinsky by the abovenamed 

hour in order that he may carry out the assignment given him. 

Chairman 0/ the State Planning Commission 

KRzmzHANoVSKY14 

Krzhizhanovsky asked-and without much authority either. And 

only because southern metallurgy was of "particularly important 

significance at the present moment," and only "in order that 

[Palchinskyl may carry out the assignment given him"---otherwise 

you can do whatever you want with him, or put hiIn back 

in his cell if you please. 

No, Palchinsky was permitted to go on working for a while, 

reconstructing the mining industry of the U.S.S.R. After showing 

ci~reh steadfastness in prison, he was shot without trial-in 1929. 

You would have to have no love whatever for your country, 

you would have to be hostile to it, to shoot the-pride of the nation 

-its concentrated knowledge, energy, and talent! 

And wasn't it exactly the same twelve years later in the case of 

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov? Was not Vavilov a gen\line political 

(out of bitter necessity)? In the course of eleven months of interrogation 

he enduted four hundred interrogation sessions. And 

at his trial (July 9, 1941) he refused to confess to the charges 

against him! 

And without any world fame whatever, the hydraulic engineer 

Professor Rodionov (Vitkovsky has told us about him) reJused 

to work at his profession when he was imprisoned-though that 

would have been the easy path for him. He cobbled boots. Was he 

not a genuine political? He was a peaceful hydraulic engineer. 

He had never prepared for struggle. But if despite his prison 

keepers, he held fast to his convictions-was he not a genuine 

14. TsGAOR, collection 3348, unit 167, sheet 32.

In Place of PoUtictJls I 315 

political? What need had he for some Party membership card for 

that? . , 

Just as a star suddenly flares to a hundred times its previous 

brightness-and then fades away, so, too, a human being not disposed 

td be a political may nonetheless flare up briefly and intensely 

in prison and periSh as a result. Ordinarily we do not 

learn about these cases. Sometimes there is'a witness to tell about 

them. Sometimes there is merely a faded piece of paper in front 

of us on which we can only build hypotheses: 

Yakov Yefunovich Pochtar, 1887, non-Party, physician. From 

the beginning of the war.he waS at the 45th Air Force Base of 

the Black Sea Fleet. His first sentence from a court-martial at the 

Sevastopol base (November 17, t941) was five years of corrective-labor 

camp. This would seem to be not too bad. But what's 

this? There was a second sentence on November 22: to be·shot. 

And on November 27 he was shot. What happened in those. fateful 

five ,days between the seventeenth and the twenty-second? J>id 

he explode like a star? Or was it merely that the judges suddenly 

reaIized they had given him toO" little?" 

_ 

What about the Trotskyites? They were pure-blooded politicals. 

That's something you cannot deny them. 

(Someone is shouting at me! A little bell is being jingled at 

. me: Stop right therel Speak about the one-and-only politicalsl 

About the uncrushable Communists who even:in the camps continued 

to keep the sacred faith ... All right, we win set aside the 

next c;hapter separately for them.) 

Someday hisfurians will study the question: At what moment 

did a trickle of political young people begin to flow in our country? 

It seems to me that it began in 1943 and 1944. (I am not 

referring here. to the socialist and Trotskyite young people.) 

While still practically schoolboys, they suddenly began to seek: 

out their own platform (remember the "Democratic Party" of 

.1944), difterent from the one that was being intensely urged on 

them and shoved under their feet. Well, what else can we call 

tlteln? 

Only that we know nothing of them and never will. 

But if twenty-tvio-year-old Arkady Belinkov was 'imprisoned 

for his first novel, A Rough Draft of Fefllings (1943), never published, 

of course, and continued to write in camp (but at death's 

15. He bas now been rehabilitated on the initial charges. And that means 

that if it bad not been for the second case against him ••• ? 

J 


door trusted the stool pigeon Kermaier and was handed another 

sentence), can we really deny him the title of political? 

In 1950 the students of the Leningrad School of Mechanics 

created their own party with a program and statutes. Many.were 

shot. Aron Levin, who got twenty-five years for it, told us. And 

that is all: a roa9side marker. 

And it gOes without saying that our contemporary politicals 

need incomparably greater steadfastness and heroism than $e 

earlier revolutionaries. In those days the pUnishments given for 

far more serious actions were quite light arid revolutionaries didn't 

have to be so very bold: in case of failure they risked only them- . 

selves (not their families!), and not even their heads-but a short 

term only. 

What did posting leaflets amount to before the Revolution? It 

was an amusement, like scaring pigeons, and you wouldn't even· 

get three months for it. But five boys in Vladimir Gershuni's 

group prepared leaflets declaring that "Our government has comproInised 

itself!" This reqriired approximately the same deterInination 

as the five boys in Aleksandr Ulyanov's group needed in 

their attempt to assassinate the Tsar. 

And how the following story blazes up through spontaneous 

combustion, how it comes awake on its own somewhere inside! 

In the city of Leninsk-Kuznetskiy was one boys' school .. Starting 

in the ninth grade, five boys (Misha B.akst, their KOInsomol 

organizer; Tolya Tarantin, also a KOInsomol activist; Velvel 

Reikhtman, Nikolai Konev, and Yuri Anikanov) lost their peace 

of mind. Not over the girls nor over the latestdances--they 

looked around them at the savagery and drunkenness in their own 

city and pored over their history textbooks, trying to make cone 

nections and compare. As they entered the tenth grade in 1950, 

just before the elections to the lOcal soviets, they produced their 

first .(and last) naive leaflet, in printed characters: 

Listen, workerl Are we really living the kind of life for Which our 

grandfathers, fathers, and brothers fought? We work-and get only 

a pitiful pittance in return, and they even cut down on that too. Read 

this and think about your life. 

They themselves were only thinking-and therefore they did 

not summon to any particular action. (Their plan was to issue a 

series of such leaflets and to make their own hectograph.)


Here is how they posted the leaflets: They went around together 

at night. One of them would plaster four pieces of wet bread on 

the wall, and another would paste a leaflet on them. 

In early spring some new pedagogue came to them in class 

and asked them . . . to fill out a questionnaire, printing the letters. 

1S The principal pleaded that they not be arrested before the 

end of the school year. Imprisoned and under interrogation, the 

boys regretted most of all not being at their own graduation party. 

"Who was directing you? Confess!" (The gaybisty simply couldn't 

believe that the boys had been guided simply by their own consciences. 

After all, it was an extraordinary occurrence. After all, 

you only live once. Why think about things?) Punishment blocks, 

night interrogations, long hours of standing. A session of the 

Provincial Court closed to the public (of course).n Pitiable 

defense lawyers, confused judicial assessors, a threatening prosecutor 

named Trutnev(!).* And all of them given eight- and tenyear 

sentences, and all of them, seventeen-year-olds, sent to 

Special Camps. 

No, the old proverb does not lie: Look for the brave in prison, 

and the stupid among the politicalleadersl 

I am writing for mute Russia and therefore I have but little 

to say about the Trotskyites; they are all people who write, and 

any who have succeeded in surviving have in all probability prepared 

detailed memoirs and will write their dramatic epics more 

completely and more accurately than I could. . 

But here are a few words for the sake of the overall picture. 

The.y conducted a regular underground struggle in the late 

twenties, deploying all their experience as former revolutionaries, 

except that the GPU arrayed against them was not as stupid as 

the Tsarist Okhrana. I do not know whether they were prepared 

for that total· annihilation which Stalin had allotted them, or 

whether they still thought that it would all end with jokes and 

reconciliation. In any case,. they were heroic people. (I fear, 

however, that if they had come to power, they would have brought 

us a madness no better than Stalin's.) Let us note that even in 

16. The boys were sold down the river by Fyodor Polotnyanshchikov, later 

Party organizer at the Polysayev mine. The country must know its stool pigeons. 

17.· The judge's name was Pushkin. He was soon afterward convicted of ac 

. cepting bribes. 

318 I THE GULAG AllCHIPELAGO 

• 

the thirties, when their end was. near, they still considered any 

kind of contact with the socialists to be a betrayal and a disgrace. 

and therefore kept to the~lves in the isolators and would not 

even pass on the prison mail of the socialists. (You see, they considered 

themselves Leninists.) The wife of I. N. Smirnov (even 

after his execution) avoided contact with the socialists "so that 

the jailers would not see it" (i.e., so to say, the eyes of the Communist 

Party)! 

One gets the _impression (though I will not insist on it) that 

there was too much vanity in their political "struggle" in camp 

conditions, which gave it a touch of tragicomedy. In the cattle 

trains from Moscow to the Kolyma they used to agree "on underground 

contacts, passwords"--and they were scattered among 

various camps and various brigades. . 

For instance, a brigade of prisoners sent up for Counter-Revolutionary 

Trotskyite Activity which had honestly earned its work 

ration was suddenly put on penalty rations. What was to be done? 

"The well-hidden underground Communist Party cell" discussed 

the question. Should they strike? But this would have meant to 

nibble the bait of the provocation. They want us to fall for their 

provocation, but we---we will go proudly to work even without 

our ration! We will go to work, but we will work on a penaltynorm 

basis. IS 

At Utiny Goldfield they were making preparations for the 

twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. They collected 

black rags and they blackened white ones with charcoal. On the 

morning of November 7 they intended to hang black mourning 

flags on all the tents and to sing the "Intemationale" at line-up, 

locking arms firmly so as not to allow the jailers or the convoy 

guards into their ranks. They were determined to sing·it through, 

no matter what! And then not under any circumstances to leave 

the camp compound to workl And to shout slogans: "Down with 

Fascism!" "Hail Leninism!" "Hail the Great October Socialist 

Revolution!" 

18. This was 1937, and the brigade included not only "pure" Trotskyites but 

also "pure" orthodox Stalinists sentenced as Trotskyites. They had sent petitions 

to the' Central Committee addressed to Comrade Stalin, to the NKVD 

adaressed to Comrade Yezhov, to the Central Executive Committee addressed 

to Comrade KaUnin, and to the Prosecutor General also, and at the time they 

were anxious to avoid a faIUng-out with the camp chiefs, on whom would 

depend the accompanying recommendations.


In this plan we find a sort of hysterical enthusiasm mixed with 

futility, bordering on the ridiculous. 

However, someone, or one of themselves, turned them in ahead 

of time, and on November 6 they were taken to Yubileiny Gold-' 

field and locked in for the holidays. In closed tents (which they 

were forbidden to leave) theysarig the "Intemationale," just as 

the Yubileiny sloggers were going out to work. (But even among 

those singing there' was a division: present were unjustly imprisoned 

Communists who stood aside, who did not sing 

the "Intemationale," but showed their orthodoxy by their 

silence.) 

"H we are being kept behind bars that means we are still worth 

something," Aleksandr Boyarchikov consoled himself. A false 

consolation. Who didn't they keep there? 

The greatest achievement of the Trotskyites in the camp struggle 

was their hunger strike and work stoppage throughout the 

entire Vorkuta systeJ}toof camps. (Before that also there had been 

a hundred-day strike somewhere in the ~olyma, it seems: they 

demanded a free settlement instead of camps, and they won: they 

were promised satisfaction, and the hunger strike was lifted, they 

were scattered among various camps, where they were gradually 

annihiIated.) The information I have on the Vorkuta hunger 

strike is contradictory. Here is approximately how it went: 

It began on October 27, 1936, and continued for 132 days. 

(They were fed artificially, but did not lift the hunger strike.) 

Several died of starvation. Their demands were: 

• Separation of the politicals from the criminals 19 

• Ail eight-hour workday 

• The restoration of the special (ation for politicals 20 and 

the issuing of rations independently of work performance 

• Destruction of the OSO-the Special Board-and annulment 

of its- verdicts . 

They were fed through a tube, and thereupon a rumor spread 

through the camps that there was a shortage of sugar and butter 

"because it had all been fed to the Trotsliyites" -a trick worthy of 

19. Did they include among those politicals the 58's other th!!-n themselves? 

Probably not; if they had rejected even the socialists, they' were unable to 

recognize the KR's as their brothers .. 

20. This, of course, was solely for themselves. 

320 I THB GU~AG ARCHIPB.LAGO 

the bluecaps! In March, 1937, a telegram came from Moscow: 

The demands of the hunger strikers are to be accepted in toto! The 

hunget strike was lifted. Helpless prisoners; how could they enforce 

the fulfillment of those promises? They were just lied tonot 

one of their demands was met. (No Westerner will ever 

believe or comprehend that it WI![ possible to act like this. But - 

that's the whole story of our country.) On the contrary, all the 

hunger strikers were processed through the security'chief's office 

and charged with contin~g their counterrevolutionary activity. 

The great hoot owl in the Kremlin had already thought up his 

short shrift for them. 

A bit later at Vorkuta Mine No.8 there was one more big 

hunger strike. (Which may have been part of the preceding one.) 

One hundred and seventy persons participated in it, certain of 

them known by name: the strikers' spokesman was Mikhail 

Shapiro, a former worker of the Kharkov VEF; Dmitri Kurinevsky 

from the Kiev Province· Komsomol Committee; Ivanov, 

former commander of a squadron' of patrol boats in the Baltic 

Fleet; Orlov-Kamenetsky; Mikhail Andreyevich; Polevoi-Genkin; 

V. V. Verap, the editor of the Tbilisi newspaper Zarya 

Vostoka (Dawn of the East); Sokrat Gevorkyan, Secretary of the 

Central Committee of the Party in Armenia; Grigory Zolotnikov, 

a history professor; and his wife. 

The nucleus of the hunger strike consisted of sixty persons 

imprisoned together in 1927-1928 in the Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator. 

It was a big surprise-gratifying to the strikers and unpleasant 

for the chiefs-that twenty thieves also joined in the 

strike, headed by their ringleader, who was known by the ~ckname 

of Moscow. (In that camp he was famous for one nighttime 

escapade: he had I!Jade his way to the camp chief's office 

and there relieved himself on the desk. Any of our politicals 

would have been shot for that, b~t all he got was a reprimand: 

It must have been the class enemy who taught you that.) These 

twenty thieves truly irritated the chiefs, whereas the security 

officer of Vorkutlag, Uzkov, taunted the "hunger-strike leadership" 

of hostile prisoners by saying: "Do you think that Europe 

knows about your strike? We don't give a damn abmit'Europe!" 

And he was right. But the socially friendly bandits could be 

neither beaten up nor allowed to ,die. However, halfway through 

the strike things got through to their lumpe~proletariat conscious-


ness, and the thieves broke off, and. their ringleader, Moscow, 

explained on the camp radio that the Trotskyites had deceived 

him. . 

. Mer this the fate of the restwas to be shot. Their hunger strike 

had provided ba.th their apPlications and the-list of those executed. 

No, there were genuine politicals. There were many of them. 

And they sacrificed themSelVes. .' 

But why were the results of their opposition so insignificant? 

Why did they not leave even the ,scantiest bubbles on the surface? 

We will analyze this too. Later on.ill 

Chapter 11 

• 

The Loyalists 

21. Part V. Chapter 4. 

But I hear an angry 'roar of voices. The comrades' patience has 

run out! They will slam my book shut, toss it away, and spit on 

it: 

"In the last analysis, this is brazen'impudence! It's slander! 

Where is he looking for genuine politicals? Whom is he wri~g 

about? About some priests, technocrats, sniveling schoolboys ... ? 

The real politicals are us! Us,' the unshakable! Us, the orthodox, 

crystal-clear people." (And Orwell called them Goodthinkers.) 

Us, who even in the camps stayed .faithful to the very end 

to the one-and-only-true '.' . 

Yes, judging by our press and publishers-you were the only 

ones imprisoned, by and large. Only you suffered. You are the 

only ones we are allowed to write about. All right, let's do it. 

Will the reader agree with this criterion: that political prisoners 

are those who know what they are serving time for and are firm 

,n their convictions? 

If you agree, then here is the answer: Our unshakable Comnunists, 

who despite their personal arrest remained devoted to 

:he one-and-only-true, etc., were firm in their convictions but 

did not know what they were serving time for! And therefore they 

cannot be considered political prisoners. 

If my criterion is no good, then let us take the criterion of 

Anna Skripnikova, who, in the course of her five terms, had time 

enough to think the matter over. Here it is: 

A political prisoner is one with beliefs whose renunciation could 

could s'ecure his release. People without suc~ beliefs are political 

riftraff. 

322

The Loyalists I 323 

In my opinion this is not a bad criterion. All those who at any 

time have been persecuted for ideology fit into it. All revolutionaries 

fit into it. All the so-called "nuns" and the Archpriest PreobrazheDSky 

fit into it, and Engineer PalchiDSky. But the orthodox 

Communists ..• do not: Which beliefs are they being 

required to' renounce? 

_ 

None. And that means that the orthodox Communists, even 

though it is insulting to put it this way, are like that tailor and 

the deaf-and-dumb man and the club watchman, who fitted into 

the category of helpless, uncomprehending victims. But-with 

arrogance. 

Let us be precise and define our subject. Who 'are we going 

to-be dehling with in this chapter? 

With all those who, despite their imprisonment, the mockery 

of an interrogation, their undeserved sentence, and the subs~uent 

searing camp experiences, retained their Communist convictions? 

No, not about all of them. Among them were people for whom 

this Communist faith was an inner thing, sometimes the sole 

meaning of the lives remaining to them, but: 

• They did not let it lead them into taking a "party" attitude 

toward their imprisoned comrades, and in cell and barracks 

arguments they did not shout at others that these latter had 

been justly imprisoned. (Meaning that 'T' was imprisoned 

unjustly.) 

• They did not rush to declare to the citizen camp chief 

(and to the security chief), "I am a Communist," and did not 

use this formula to survive in camp. 

• And now, when speaking of the p,ast, they do not see the 

principal and only violence of the camps to have consisted in 

the fact that Communists were imprisoned-and spit on all 

the rest. 

-In a word, they were th!Jse whose Communist convictions were 

inward and not constantly on the tips of their tongues. It was 

as if this were an individualist trait, but in fact such individuals 

did not ordinarily hold big jobs in freedom, and in camp they 

worked as ordinary sloggers. _ 

Take, for _example, Avenir Borisov, a village schoolteacher: 


''Do you remember our youth-I myself was bom in 1912- 

when our supreme happiness was the green 'Jungsturm' uniform 

made out.ofhomespun 'cloth, with a waist belt and a shoulder 

strap, when we despised money and everything private and personal 

and were ready to march in any cause, as soon as the summons 

came?1 I joined the Komsomol at the age of thirteen. And 

when I was all of twenty-four years old the NKVD organs charged 

me with nearly everysection~Article58." (We will see later how 

he conducted himself after his release; he is a decent person.) 

Or Boris Mikhailovich Vinogradov, with whom I served time 

in prison. In his youth he had been a locomotive engineer (not 

just for one year either, in the way that certain deputies were 

shepherds for a year). After the workers' school and an institute, 

he became a railway transport engineer (and was not put immediately 

on Party work, as often happens too), and he was a good 

engineer (in the sharashka he carried out complex calculations 

in gas dynamics for jet turbines). But by 1941, it's true, he had 

become the Party organizer of the Moscow Institute for Railroad 

Engineering. In the bitter Moscow days of October 16 and 17, 

1941, seeking instructions, he telephoned but no one replied. He 

went to the District Party Committee, ~e City Party Committee, 

the Provincial Party Committee, and found no Qne there; everyone 

had scattered to the winds; their chambers were empty. And it 

seems he didn't go any higher than that. He returned to his own 

people in the Institute and declared: "Comrades! All the leaders 

have run away. But we are Communists, we will join the defense." 

. And they did just that. But for that remark of his, ''They have all 

run away," those who had run away sent him who had not run 

away to prison for eight years-for Anti-Soviet Propaganda. He 

'was a quiet worker, a dedicated friend, and only in heart-to-beart 

conversation would he disclose that he believed, believes, and will 

go on believing. And he never wore it on his sleeve. 

Or take the geologist Nikolai Kalistratovich Govorko, who, 

when he was a· Vorkuta last-Iegger, composed his "Ode to.Stalin" 

(which has been preserved). But he did not write it for publication, 

nor in order to receive privileges in return, but because 

it poured straight from his heart. And he hid that ode in the 

mine! (Though what was there to hide'll 

1. The italics, to be sure, are mine. 

"

Th4 Loyalists I 325 

Sometimes such people kept their faith to the end. Sometimes 

(like Kovacs, a Hungarian from Philadelphia arrested in 1937, 

Who belonged to one of the thirty-nine families who had come to 

found a commune near Kakhovka) they refused after rehabilitation 

to take back their Party card. CertaiD. others broke away 

even earlier, like another Hungarian named Szabo, who had 

been commander of a Siberian partisan detachment in the Civil 

War. Back in 1937 he had declared in prison, "If I were free 

right now, rd collect my partisans together~ raise Siberia, and 

march on Moscow and chase all those bastards out." . 

So we are not gOing to deal in this chaptet with Communists 

of either the first or the second kind. (And the orthodox Communists 

themselves have eliminated all those who broke with the 

Party, like the two Hungarians.) . 

Nor will we be concerned with such anecdotal individualsas 

those who in prison only pretended to be orthodox Communists, 

so that the cell stoolie would give the interrogator a goOd re- 

- port: like the young Podvarkov, who when free had pasted up leaf- 

-lets, but in the Spassk Camp used to argue loudly with all.opponents 

of the regime, including his own father, counting on lightening 

his own fate by this means. 

Here we shall concern ourselves particularly with th08e'orthodox 

Communists who made a display of their ideological orthodoxy 

first to the i'nterrogator, then in the prison cells, and then 

in _ camp to all and everyone, and now recall their camp past in 

this light. 

By a strange selective process noDe of them will be sloggeJS. 

Such people ordinarily had held big jobs before their arrest, and 

had had an enviable situation; alid in camp they foUnd it hardest 

of all to reconcile themselves to extinction, and they fought fiercest 

of all to me above the universal zero. In this category were all 

the interrogators, prosecutors, judges, and camp officials who had 

landed behind bars. And all the theoreticians, dogmatists,. and 

loud-mouths (the writers O. Serebryakova, B. Dyakov, and 

Aldan-Semyonov belong here. and nowhere else). 

We have to understand them,. aDd we won't scoff at them. It 

was painful for them to fall. "When you cut down trees, the chips 

will flyl" was the cheerful proverb of justification. And then suddenly 

they themselves were chopped off with all the other chips. 

Prokhorov-Pustover describes a scene at Manzovka, a specia! 


camp of BAMlag; at the beginning of 1938. To the surprise of all 

the natives, they brought in some sort of UIIprecedented "special 

contingent" and separated it from' the others with great secretiveness. 

No one had ever yet observed such an arrival: the newcomers 

wore leather coats, fur caps" woolen and cheviot suits, 

fashionable shoes and oxfords (by the twentieth anniversary of 

the Revolution this select group had already discovered a standard 

of taste in clothes which was not available to working people). 

Because of bad management or out of mockery the camp authorities 

didn't give them work clothes and drove them out just as 

they were, in their cheviots and chrome leather, to dig ditches 

in liquid clay up to their knees. At the jUllction 'of the wheelbarrow 

fUll one zek upset a wheelbarrow with ,cement, and the 

cement poured out. A thief brigadier ran up, cursed the zek at 

fault, 'and pushed him in the back: "Pick it up with your hands, 

. stupid!" And the zek shouted hysterically: "How dare you taUllt 

me! I am a former prosecutor of the RepUblic!" And big tears 

rolled down his face. "What the --- do I care if you're a 

prosecutor of the Republic, scum! I'll push your snoot in that 

cement, then you'll be a prosecutor! Now you're, ail enemy of 

the people and you've got to put your nose to the grindstone!" 

(However, it appears that the work supervisor intervened on behalf 

of the prosecutor.) 

Now just tell us of a scene like that involving a Tsarist prosecutor 

in a concentration camp in 1918-no one would have 

dreamed of taking pity on him; it was unanimously recognized 

that they were not people. (And, the sentences they had sought for 

the defendants they had prosecuted had been one year, three 

years, five.) But how was it possible--not to take' pity on one's 

own SoViet proletarian prosecutor, even if h~ was dressed in a 

woolen Suit? (The ~tences he had demanded were ... a tenrub!e 

bill and the super.) 

To say that things were painful for them is to say almost 

nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such 

a downfall, and from their own people too, from their dear Party, 

and, from all appearances, for nothing at all. After all, they had 

been guilty of nothing as far as the Party was concerned-nothing 

at all. 

It was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered 

taboo among them, Ullcomradely, to ask: "What were you im-


prisonedfor?" The only squeamish generation of prisoners! The 

rest of us, in 1945, with tongiIes hanging out, used to recount 

our arrests, couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer 

we met and to the whole cell, as if it were an anecdote. 

Here's th~ sort of people they were. Olga Sliozberg's husband 

had already been arrested, and they had come to carry out a 

search and arrest her too. The search lasted four hours-and she 

spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the congress of 

Stakhanovites of the bristle and brush industry, of which she had 

been the !lecretary until the previous day. The incomplete state 

of the minutes troubled her more than her children, whom she 

was leaving forever! Even the interrogator conducting the search 

could not resist telling her: "Come on now, say farewell to your 

children!" 

Here's the sort of people they were._A letter from her fifteenyear-old 

daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsvetkova in the Kazan 

Prison for long-term prison~rs: "Mama! Tell me, write to me- 

are you guilty or not? I hope you weren't guilty, because then I 

won't join the Komsomol, and I won't forgive them because of 

you. But if you are guilty-I won't write you any more and will 

hate you." And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp 

gravelike cell with its-dim little lamp: How could her daughter 

live without the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to 

hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me. And she wrote: 

"I am guilty .... Enter the KomsomoI!" • 

How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human 

heart coulel bear: to fall beneath the beloved ax-then to have 

to justify its wisdom. ' - 

But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given 

soul to human dogma. 

Even today any orthodox Communist will affirm that Tsvetkova 

acted correctly. Even today they cannot be convinced that 

this is precisely the "perversion of small forces," that the mother 

perverted her daughter and harmed her soul. 

Here's the sort of people they were: Y.T. gave sincere testimony 

against her husband-anything to aid the Party! 

Oh, how one could pity them if at least now they had come to 

comprehend their former wretchedness! 

This whole chapter could have been written quite differently 

if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views! 


But it happened the way Mariya Danielyan had dreamed it 

would: "If I leave here someday, I am going to live as if nothing 

had taken place." 

Loyalty? And in our view it is just plain pigheadedness. These 

devotees of the theory of development construed loyalty to that 

- development to mean renunciation of any personal development 

whatsoever. As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchik said, after serving 

seventeen years:,. "We believed in the Party-and we were not 

mistakenf' Is this loyalty or pigheadedness? 

No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued 

in the cells in defense of all the government's actions. They 

needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of 

their own _ rightness--otherwise insanity was not far off. 

How easily one could sympathize with them all! But they all 

see so clearly what their sufferings were-and they don't see 

wherein lies their own guilt. ' 

This sort of person was not arrested before 1937. And after 

1938 very few such people were arrested. And that is why they 

were ,named the "call-up of 1937," and this would tie permissible 

but shouldn't be allowed to blur the overall picture: even at the 

peak they were not the only ones being arrested, and those same 

peasants, and workers, and young people, and engineers, and 

technicians, and agronomists, and economists, and ordinary believers 

continued to stream in as well. ~ 

The "call-up of 1937". was very loquacious, and having access 

to the press and radio created the "legend of 1937," a legend 

consisting of two points: . 

1. If they arrested people at all under the Soviet government, 

it was only in 1937, and it is necessary to speak out and be 

indignant only about 1937. 

2. In 1937 they were ... the only ones arrested. 

Here's what they write: that terrible year when they arrested 

the most devoted Communist executives: secretaries of the Central 

Committees of the Union- Republics, secretaries of the Provincial 

Party Committees; chairmen of the _Provincial Executive 

Committees; all the commanders of the military districts, of corps 

and divisions, marshals and generals, provincial' prosecutors, sec-


retaries of District Party Committees, chairmen of District Executive 

Committees ... 

At the very beginning of our book we gave a conspectus of 

the waves pouring into the Archipelago during the two decades 

up to 1937. How long all that dragged on! And how many millions 

there were! But the future call-up of 1937 didn't bat an eyelid 

and found it all normal. We do not know what expressions 

they used in discussing it among themselves, but P. P. Postyshev, 

unaware that he himself was destined to go the same way, spoke 

like this: 

In 1931, at a conference of justice officials: "... while re!8ining 

our penal policy in all its severity and cruelty in relation to the 

class enemy and to declasse offshoots ..." ("Declasse oDshoots" 

-how priceless! Just about anybody could be classified as a 

"declasse offshoot"!) 

. In 1932: "!tis understandable that ... in putting them through 

the crucible of dekulakization . • . we must never lost sight of 

the fact that this kulak of yesterday has not morally disarmed ..." 

And ag~: "In no case must the sharp blade of penal policy 

become dull." . 

And that blade, Pavel Petrovich, was so sharp! And that crucible 

so very hot! 

R. M. Ger explained it like this: "So long as the arrests involved 

people who were unknown or scarcely known to me, I 

and my acquaintances had no doubts about the well-foundedness 

[!) of those arrests. But when people close to me were arrested 

and I myself was arrested, and when I encountered dozens of the 

most loyal Communists in prison, then ..." 

In a word, they remained calm while society was being imprisoned. 

Their "outraged reason boiled" when their own feUowship 

began to be imprisoned. Stalin violated a taboo that appeared 

firmly established, and, that was why they had led such a gay life. 

Of course, they were stunned! Of course, it was a fantastic thing 

to have to grasp! And in the cells they asked heatedly: "Comrades! 

Do you know whose coup this was? Who seized power in 

our city?" 

And for a long time after, as they became convinced of the 

irrevocability of their fate, they sighed and groaned: "n only 

Lenin were alive, this never would have happened!" 

(What did they mean by this? Was it not precisely this that had 

_ 

330 I THE GULAG ARCHIl'ELAGO 

happened to the others before them? See Part I, Chapters 8 and 

9.) 

But nonetheless--they were government people! Enlightened 

Marxists! Theoreticians! And how did they cope with this ordeal? 

How did they reprocess and make sense of an historical event 

not previously digested nor explained in the newspapers? (And 

historical events always swoop down unexpectedly.) 

Dragged roughly for years down a false trail, they offered explanations 

astonishing in their profundity: 

1. It is the very cunning work of foreign intelligence services. 

2. It is wrecking on an enormous scale! Wreckers have 

taken over the NKVD! (A variation on this was: German 

agents had taken over the NKVD!) 

3. It is a plot by local NKVD men. 

And in all three cases the message was: that we ourselves 

were to blame for relaxing our vigilance! Stalin doesn't know 

anything! Stalin doesn't know about these arrests!! When he 

finds out, he will destroy them all and free us!! 

4. In the ranks of the Party there was terrible treason (but 

why??); and the entire country is teeming with enemies, and 

the majority of the people here have been correctly arrested; 

they aren't Communists but . . . Counter-Revolutionaries- 

and in the cells you have to take precautions and be careful 

not to speak in their presence. "I am the only one here who is 

completely initocent Well, you too maybe." (This was the 

variation which was adopted by Mekhanoshin, a former member 

of the Reyolutionary War Council. In other words, let 

him out, give him his way-and see how many he arrests.) 

5. These repressions are an historical necessity for the development 

of our society. (This was how a few of the theorl~ticians 

talked who had not lost their self-possession, as, for 

example, a professor from the Plekhanov Institute of National 

,Economy. The explanation was a sure one, and one had to 

admire how quickly and_ correctly he had understood it~but 

none of them .ever explained what laws they had in mind and 

they just kept blowing on the same flute from their permanent 

selection: "the historical necessity of development"-you can 

spout that nonsense about anything-and you'll always be right.)


And in all five variations no one, of course, accused Stalin 

-he remained an uneclipsed sun!2 

And if one day one of the old Party members, like, for example, 

Aleksandr Ivanovich Yashkevich, the Byelorussian censor, 

wheezed from the comer of the cell that Stalin was no right hand 

of Lenin but a dog, and until he croaked, nothing good would 

happen-they would hurl themselves on such a person with fists-, 

and hurry to denounce hini to their interrogator! 

It is impossible to imagine to oneself a Goodthinker who for 

one moment in a daydream would let out a peep about the death 

of Stalin. 

Right on that level offnquisitive thought is where the year 1937 

caught up with the loyalist orthodox Communists! And what kind 

of an attitude to their trial were they left with? Evidently like 

Parsons in Orwell's 1984: "You don't think-the Party would 

arrest an innocent man? ... 'Thank you,' rm going to say [to the 

tribunal], 'thank you for saving me before it was too late!' " 

And what way out did they find for themselves? What active 

decision did their revolutionary theory indicate? Their decision 

is just as priceless as their explanations! Here is what it is: 

The more people that are arrested, the quicker those at the top 

are going to understand their mistake! And therefore ... one has 

to tfiJ\to name as many names as possible! One has to give as 

much fantastic testimony as possible against innocents! They 

won't a"est the entire Party! 

(But.Stalin didn't need the whole Party. All he needed was its 

leadership and the members with seniority.) 

Just as oat of the members of all the Russian parties it was the 

Communists_ who turned out to be the first to give false testimony 

against themseivesB-so, too, they were the first to make the 

merry-go-round discovery: that you should name as many names 

as possible! Russian revolutionaries had never heard of anything 

like that! . 

2. And against the background of these astonishing explanations, that particular 

one' which NarQkov (Marchenko) in his novel Mnimyye Velichiny 

(Imaginary Values) ascribes to his characters seems psychologically very possible: 

that all these arrests were simply a show put on to test the true Stalinists. 

You bad to do everytbil1g demanded of you and whoever would sign everything 

without becoming embittered. would be promoted substantially later OD. 

3. Well, perhaps the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks" preceded' them, . but 

they, on the basis of their cOnvictions, were almost Bolsheviks. 


Was it their shortsightedness that showed itself in this theory? 

The poverty of their ideas? I sense instinctively that this was not 

the case, that what moved them here was fear. And that this 

theory was only" a handy camouflage to cover up their weakness. 

For, after all, they called themselves (long since unlawfully) 

revolutionaries, but when they looked inside themselves they 

shuddered: it turned out that they were incapable of standing 

up to the interrogator. And this "theory"· fre¢ them from the 

necessity of struggling against the interrogator. 

'I:'hey ought to have been able to understand at least thisthat 

for Stalin this purge 0'1 the Party was necessary in order to 

downgrade the Party in comparison with himself (for he himself 

did not have the genius to rise in comparison with the Party, even 

such as it was). 

Of course, they did not remember how very recently they 

themselves had helped Stalin destroy the opposition, yes, and 

even themselves too. After all, Stalin gave his own weak-willed 

victims the opportunity of taking a chance and rebelling, for 

this game was not without its satisfactions for him. To arrest 

each member of the Central Committee required the sanction of 

all the others! That is something the playful tiger thought up. 

And while the sham plenums and co~erences proceeded, a paper 

was passed along the rows which stated impersonally that 

materials had been received compromising a certain individual; 

and it was requested that consent be given (or refused!) to his 

expulsiOIi from the Central Committee. (And someone else 

watched to see whether the persort reading this paper held it for 

a long time.) And they all ... signed their names. And that was 

how the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party 

(Bolsheviks) shot itself. (Stalin had calculated and verified 

their weakness even earlier than that: once the top level of the 

Party had accepted as their due high wages, secret provisioning 

facilities; private sanatoriums, it was already in the trap and 

there was no way to backtrack.) And who made up the Special 

Assizes that tried Tukhachevsky and Yakir? BlUcher! Yegorov! 

(And S. A. Turovsky.) . 

And they had forgotten even more (yes, and had never read 

it anyway) such ancient history as the message of the Patriarch 

Tikhon to the Council of People's Commissars on October 26, 

1918. Appealing for mercy and for the release of the innocent, 

the staunch Patriarch warned them: "That the blood of all the


prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world may 

be required of this generation." (St. Luke, 11:50.)· And: 

" ... for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." 

(Maffhew, 26:52)· But .at that me it seemed absurd, impossible! 

How could they imagiae at that time that History 

. sometimes does-1m.ow revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed 

justice, .but chooses strailge forms for it and unexpected executors 

of its wiD. 

And though, when the young Tukhachevsky returned victorious 

from suppressing the devastated Tambov peasants, there 

was no Mariya Spiridonova waiting at the station to put a bullet 

through his bead, it was done sixteen years later by the Georgian 

priest who never graduated. 

And though the curses of the women and children shot in the 

Crimean spring of 1921, as Vol~ has told us, were incapable 

of piercing the breast of Bela Kun, this was done by his own 

comrade in the lhird International. 

And so it was with Peters, Latsis, Berzin, Agranov, Prokofyev, 

,ykst~B Artuzov, Chudnovsky, Dybenko, Uborevich, Bubnov, 

AIafuzo, Alksnis, Arenshtam, Gekker, Gettis, Yegorov, Zhloba, 

Kovtyukh, Kork, Kutyakov, Primakov, Putna, Y.· Sahlin, Feldman, 

R. Eideman; and Unshlickt, Yenukidze, Nevsky, Steklov, 

Lomov, Kaktyn, Kosior, Rudzutak. Gikalo, Goloded, Shlikhter, 

Beloborodov, Pyatakov, and Zinoviev. AlI were executed by the 

little redheaded butcher. And it would take a patient search on 

our.part to track down now what they had set their hands and 

signatures to oter the fifteen or twenty preceding years. 

Fight back? Not one of them tried to fight back. If they say it 

was difficult to fight back in Yezhov's cells, why didn't they begin 

to fight the day before their arrest? Was it really unclear where 

things were going? That means their whole prayer was that they 

themselves should be. bypassed!· Why did Ordzhonikidze commit . 

suicide so craveruy? (Or, if he was killed, why did he wait for 

it?) Why didn't Lenin's faithful companion, Kmpskaya, fight· 

. back? Why didn't she SPeak out even once with a public expose, 

like the old worker in the Rostov Flax Works? Was she really so 

afraid of losing her old woman's life? The members of the first 

Ivanovo-Voznesensk 1905 Soviet of Deputies-Alalykin and 

Spiric1onov-wby did they now sign· shameful charges against 

themselves? And why did Shubin, the representative of that same 

Soviet of Deputies, sign even more than that-that there had 


been no Ivanovo-Vomesensk Soviet of Deputies in 1905? How 

was it possible to spit on one's whole life like that? 

The GoodthiDkers themselves, remembering 1937 now, groan 

over the injustices and hOITOrs--:-but no one recaJlS the possibilities 

of fighting back which existed and which, they physically pos~ 

sessed-and which no, one made use of. And of course they never 

will explain iteitber. 'Will Yevgeny Yevtushenko, full of energy, 

take up that task...,....the true grandson of his grandfather· with 

precisely the same set of concepts (in his Autobiography and in 

The Bratsk Power Station) as those of the call-up of 19377 No, 

the time for such arguments has passed. 

All the wisdom of the imprisoned true believers was merely 

enough to destroy the traditions of our political prisoners. They 

avoided their cellmates who thought differently, hid from them, 

whispered about the horrors of the interrogation in such a way 

that the non-Party people or, God help us, the SR's, could not 

hear-"so as not to give them material against the Party." 

Yevgeniya Goltsman in the Kazan Prison (1938) was opposed 

to knocking out signals between cells; as a Com~st she was 

against violating Soviet laws! And when they brought a newspaper, 

Goltsman insisted that her cellmates read it in full detail, 

not just superficially! 

The prison portion of Y. Ginzburg's memoirs gives us frank 

'testimony on the call-up of 1937. The hard-head Yuliya 

Annenkova demanded of the cell: "Don't dare make fun of the 

. jail~r! He is the representative here of Soviet powerf' (Well? 

" Everything had. turned upside down! Show that little scene in that 

fairy-tale crystal ball to the unruly revolutionary women in a 

Tsarist prison!) And the Komsomol member' Katya Shirokova 

asked Oinzburg in the frisking room: ''That German CommuniSt 

woman over there has gold hidden in her hair, but it's our Soviet 

prison, so shouldn't we tell the jailer?" 

And Yekaterina Olitskaya, who traveled to the Kolyma in 

the same railroad car as Ginzburg, No.7-this car consisted· 

almost entirely of women Communists--supplements her rich 

recollections with two astonishing details. 

Those who had money gave some of it to buy scallions, and 

Olitskaya was the person in the car to whom they were handed: 

With her SR traditions, it never entered her head to do otherwise 

than divide them up among all forty prisoners. But she was immediately 

brought up short: "Divide them among the people who


gave the money!" ''We can't feed ~upers!" "We don't have 

enough ourselves!" Olitskaya ,was stupefied: were these politicals? 

They were women Communists of the 1937 call-up! 

And a second episode. In the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison baths 

these women were driven naked between formations of jailers. 

Nothing happene4 •. and they were reassured. And in the ensuing 

stages of their journey they sang in their car: 

I know no othef country 

Where a person breathes so freely! 

Now it's with that sort of complex of world outlook, it's on 

that level of conscio~nes, that the Goodthinkers started on 

their long camp roadJ Having understood nothing from the 

very beginning, neither about their arrest, nor interrogation. nor 

events in general. out of stubbornness. out of loyalty (or out of 

desperation?). they would'henceforth, throughout the journey. 

regard themselves as bearers of light, and proclaim themselves 

as the only ones who understood the essence of things. 

Having once made the decision not to notice an~ around 

them and not to draw conclusions. they would then try all the 

more not to notice what was worst of all for them: how they 

looked, this newly arrived call-up of 1937, still very decent in 

clothes, manners, and conversation, to the camp inmates. to the 

nonpolitical offenders, and to the 58's too. (Any of the dis 

.possessed "kulaks" who had survived was, right then. finishing 

his first tenner.) Here they came, those who used to carry brief-· 

cases and look important! Here came those who had gone about 

in personally assigned automobiles! Here came those who. at the 

tiine of ration cards, used to receive provisions from special closed 

stores! Here came those who got fat .at sanatoriums and wo~ized 

at resorts! While the rest of us, under the law of "Seveneighths." 

were being given ten years in c~p for a head of cab~ 

bage, for an ear of com. And so they were hated and told: "Out 

there in freedom, you did us in, but here we are going to do you 

in!" (But this won't happen. All the orthodox Comunts~ are 

soon going to get themselves well fixed up.) 4 

4. Y. GiDzbuig cites a completely contrary scene. The prison nurse asks: "Is 

it true that you tried to help the poor peol'le, that you. are imprisoned because 

of the collective farmers?" It is an almost unbelievable question. Perhaps the 

prison nurse, behind bars. saw nothing at aU, and therefore asked such a stupid 

question. But the collective farmers and the ordinary camp inmates.had eyes 

and they immediately recognized the people who had carried out the monstrous 

cattle drive of "collectivization." 

336 I THB GULAG AllCHIPBLAGO 

What does the loyalists' lofty truth consist of? Simply that 

they do not want to renounce a single one of their former values -_ 

Qr accept a single new one. Let life. gush over them, surge over 

them, and even roll over them with wheels-still they won't let it 

into their heads! They won't accept it, as though it weren't 

happening at all! This reluctance to change anything inside their 

own brains, this simple inability to make a critical assessment of 

their life's experience, is what they pride themselves on! Prison 

must not influence their world outlook! Camp must not influence 

it! What they stood uP9n before, they will continue to stand by 

now! We ... are Marxists! We ... are materialists! How can 

we possibly change because we landed in prison by sheer chance? 

(How can our -consc.ousness change if existence changes, if it 

manifests new aspects of itself? Not for anything! Even if that 

existence falls through the floor and disappears, it won't determine 

our consciousness! For, after all, we are materialists! ... ) 

That is the extent of their perception of what has' happened 

to them. V. M. Zarin: ''I always used to say to my~elf in camp: 

just because of fools [i.e., those who had arrested him] I do not 

intend to quarrel with Soviet power!" 

Here is their inevitable moral: I have been imprisoned fornothing 

and that means I am. good, and that all these people 

around me are enemies and have been imprisoned for good cause. 

And here is how their energy is spent: Six and twelve times 

a yeai' they send 01 complaints, declarations, and petitions. And 

what do they write about? What do they scrawl in them? Of 

course, they swear loyalty to the Great Genius (and without that 

they won't be released). Of course, they dissociate themselves 

from those already shot in their case. Of course, they beg to b~ 

forgiven and permitted to return to their old jobs at the top. And 

tomorrow they will gladly accept any Party assignment whatever 

nev~ to run this camp! (And the fact that all the complaints 

and petitions were met with just as thick a shoal of rejections 

-well, that was because they didn't reach Stalin! He would have 

understood! He would have forgiven, the benefactor!) 

Fine ''politicals'' they were if they begged the government 

for . . . forgiveness'! Here was the level of their consciousness-- 

, General Gorbatov in his memoirs: ''The court? What had it done 

wrong? Someone had given it orders .... " Oh, what a profound 

analysis! And what angelic Bolshe"l1ik meekness! The thieves 

asked Gorbatov: "Why did you get here?" (Incidentally,


Gorbatov has them asking politely, which they would never do!) 

And Gorbatov replied: "Bad people slandered me." No, what an 

analysis, really, what an analysis! And the general behaved not 

like Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, but like Fetyukov instead: he 

went to clean up the office in the hope of receiving an extra 

crust of bread for it. "Brushing the crumbs and crusts from the 

table, and sometimes pieces of bread, I began to satisfy my 

hunger somewhat better." All right, go on and .satisfy it! .But 

Ivan Denisovich is charged with heavy guilt because he thinks 

a:bout porridge and has no social consciousness, while General 

Gorbatov can get away with anything because he thinks . .. ,about 

bad people! (Nonetheless Ivan Denisovich did not go wrong, and 

he has boider opinions about what goes on in the country than 

the general.) 

And here is V. P. Golitsyn, son of a district physician, a road 

engineer; he was imprisoned for 140 (one hundred forty!) days 

in a death cell (plenty of time to think!). And then he got 

fifteen years, and after that external exile. "In my mind nothing 

~degnahc I was the same non-Party Bolshevik as before. My faith 

in the Party helped me, the fact that the evil was being done 

not by the Party and government but by the evil will of c;e.!'tain 

people [what an analysis!] who came and went [but some.4!1nV. 

they never seemed to go ... ], but all the rest Ill] remained. ... 

And ordinary Soviet people ~o helped me endure it, of whom 

in 1937-1938 there were very many, both in the NKVD [i.e., in 

its apparatus!], and in the pstm,s, and in the camps. Not the 

'godfathers' but the real'Dze!Zbinsky men." (This surpasses all 

understanding: those Dzerzhinsky men, of whom there were. so 

many-what were they doing there, just looking on at the crimes 

of certain people? Yet they did not get involved in these crimes 

themselves? Though at the same time they survived? 

Miracles . . . !) 

Or Boris Dyakov: "I suffered Stalin's death with acute pain." 

(Was he alone? All the orthodox Communists felt the same.) 

It seemed to him as if all hopes for release had faded! ... s 

But, people are shouting at me: "That's dishonest! Dishonest! 

You must argue with, real theoreticians! From the Institute of Red 

Professors!" . 

All right; as you will! As if rd not done it before! What else 

S. Oktyabr, 1964. No.7. 

338 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO' 

was I doing in prison'! And on prison transports'! And at transit 

prisons'! At first I argued alongside them, taking their side. But 

somehow our arguments seemed to me too thin. And at that 

point I began to keep silent and just listen. And then I argued 

against them. Yes, even Zakharov himself, the teacher of 

Malenkov (and he was very proud-of having been Malenkov's 

teacher too), even he condescended to debate with me. 

And here's -what: All those arguments seem in retrospect to 

have coalesced into one argument in my head. It is as if all these 

dogmatists taken together had been rolled into . . . one person. 

Time after time he would advance the very same argument in 

the same words at the same point. And would be equally impenetrable-:-impenetrability, 

that was their chief trait! Armorpiercing 

shells for iron-heads have not yet been invented! In 

arguing with them, you wear yourself out, unless you accept 

in advance that the argument is simply a game, a jolly pastime. 

My friend Panin* and I are lying on the middle shelf of a 

Stolypin compartment and have set ourselves up comfortably, 

tucked our salt herring in our pockets'so we don't need water 

and can go to sleep. But at some station or other they shove into 

our compartment ... a Marxist scholar! We can even tell this 

from his goatee and spectacles. He doesn't hide the fact: he is a 

former professor cif the Communist Academy. We hang head 

down in the square' cutout-and from his very first words we 

see that he is: impenetrable. But we have been serving time for 

a long while and have a long time left to serve, and we value a 

merry joke, We must climb down to have a bit of fun! There is' 

ample space in the compartment, and so we exchange places 

with someone and crowd in: 

''Hello.'' 

''Hello.'' 

"You're not too crowded'!" 

''No, it's all right." 

"Have you been in the jug a long time'!" 

"Long enough." 

"Are you past the halfway mark,!" 

"Just." . 

"Look over there: how poverty-stricken our villages arestraw 

thatch, crooked· huts." 

"An inheritance from the Tsarist regime."

The Lqyalists I 339 

"Well, but we've already had thirty Soviet years." 

''That's an insignificant period historically." 

''It's terrible that the collective farmers are starving." 

"But have you looked in all their ovens?" 

"Just ask any collective farmer in our compartment." 

''Everyone in jail is embittered and prejudiced." 

"But I've seen collective·farms myself." 

''That means they were uncharacteristic." 

(The goatee had never been in any -of them-that way it 

was simpler.) 

"Just ask the old folks: under the Tsar they were well fed, well 

clothed, and they used to have so many holidays;" 

'Tm not even going tq as~. It's a subjective trait of human . 

memory to praise everything about the past The cow that died 

is the one that gave twice the milk. [Sometimes he even cited 

proverbs!] And our people don't like holidays. They like to 

. work." . 

''But why is there a shortage of bread in many cities?" 

"When?" . 

''Right before the war, for example." 

''Not true! Before the war, in' fact, everything had been 

worked' out." . 

''Listen, at that time mall the cities on' the Volga there were 

: queues-of t!t0usands of people .•.• " 

"Some local failure in supply. But more likely your memory 

is failing you." 

. ''But there's a shortage now!" 

"Old wives' tales. We'have from seven to eight billion pobds 

of grain.''' 

"And the grain i~lf is ro!ten." 

"Not at all. We have been successful in developing new varieties 

of grain." 

"But in many shops the shelves are empty." 

''Inefficient distribution in local areas." 

"Yes, and the prices are bigh. The workers have to do without 

many things." , 

"Our prices are more--scientifically based than anywhere else." 

''That means wages are low." 

6. And not sO soon afterward Khrushchev would discover that in 1952 less 

breadgrain was ~ing harvested than in 1913. -' 

340 I THE .GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

"And the wages, too, ale scientifically based." 

"That means they're based in such. a way that the worker 

works for the state for free the greater part of his time." 

"You don't know anything about economics. What is your 

profession?" 

"Engineer." 

"And lam an economist. Don't algue. 'Surplus value is even 

impossible here." 

''But why is it that the father of a family used to be able to feed 

his family by his own labor, and that now two or three in the 

family have to work?" 

"Because there was unemployment previously, and the Wife 

couldn't get work. And the family went hungry. Furthermore, 

, the wife's working is important for her equality." 

"What the devil do you mean by equality? And who does 

all the household work?" 

"The husband has to help." 

"And how about you-did you help your wife?" 

"I am not maIried." , 

"So each of them used to work during the day, and now both 

of them have to work in the evenings too. And the woman has 

no time for the main thing-for bringing up the children." 

"She has quite enough. They ale mainly brought up by the 

kindergarten, school, and Komsomol." 

''Well, and how ale $ey bringing them up? They grow up 

to be hooligans and petty thieves and the girls . . • run free and 

loose." 

"Not at all. Our youth have lofty principles." 

"That's what the papers say. But our papers tell lies!" 

"They are much more honest than the bourgeois newspapers! 

You ought to read the bourgeois newspapers." 

"Just give me the chance!" 

"That's not necessary at all." 

"And our newspapers still telies!~' 

"They ale openly bound to the proletariat." 

''That's the kind of bringing up that makes the crime rate 

grow." 

"Op the contrary, it's falling. Give me the statistics." 

(This in a country where even the number of-sheep. tails is 

classified as a secret!)


"And another reason our crime rate is rising is that our laws 

themselves give rise to crime. They are ferocious and ri~ 

diculous." 

"On the c~ntrary, they are fine laws. The finest in the history 

of humanity." 

. "Especially Article 58." 

"Without it our young state would not have been able to hold 

out." 

"It's no longer so very young!" 

"Historically speaking it is very young." 

"But look around at the number of people imprisone9." 

"They got what they deserved." 

"And what about you?" 

"I was jailed by mistake. They will.sort things out and release 

me." 

(They all leave themselves this loophole.) 

"By mistake? Then what kind of laws do we have?" 

"The laws are excellent, it is the deviations from them that are . 

unfortunate." 

"Everywhere there is graft, bribes, corruption." 

"We have to intensify our Communist upbringing." . 

And so forth. He is imperturbable. He speaks in a language 

which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is 

like walking through a desert. . . 

It's about people like that that they say: ''He made the rounds 

of all the smithies and came home unshod." 

And when they write in their obituaries: "perished tragically 

during the period 9f the cult," this should be corrected to read: 

"perished comically." 

But if his fate had worked out differently, we would never 

have learned what a dry, insignificant little man he was. We 

would have respectfully read his name in the newspaper. He 

would have become a people's commissar or even ventured to 

represent all Russia abroad. 

To argue with him was useless. It was much more interes~g 

to play with him ... no, not at chess, but at the game of "comrades." 

There really is such a game. It is a very simple game. 

Just play up to him a couple .of times or so, use some of his own 

pet words and phrases. He will like it.- For he has grown accustomed 

to find that all around him ••. are enemies. He has become 


weary of snarling and doesn't like to tell his stories because·all 

those stories will be twisted around and thrown right back in his 

face. But if he takes you for one of his own, he will quite humanly 

disclose to you what he has just seen at the station;. People are 

passing by, talking, laughing, life goes on. The Party is providing 

leadership, people are being moved from job to job. Yet you and 

I are languishing here in prison, there are a handful of us, and 

we must write and write petitions, begging a review of our cases, 

begging for a pardon. . . . 

Or else he will tell you something interesting: In the Communist 

Academy they decided ·to devour one comrade; they felt 

he wasn't quite genuine, not one of our own; but s.omehow they 

couldn't manage it: there were no errors in his essays, and his 

biography was clean. Then all of a sudden, going through the 

archives, what a find! They ran across an old brochure written 

by this comrade which Vladimir llyich Lenin himself had held 

in his hands and in the margin of which he had written in his 

own handwriting the notation: "As an economist he is shit." 

"Well, now, you understand," our companion sIniled confidentially, 

''that after that it was no trouble at all to make short work 

of that muddlehead and impostor. He was expelled from the 

Academy and deprived of his scholarly rank." 

The railroad cars go clicking along. Everyone is already asleep, 

some lying down, some sitting up. Sometimes a convoy guard 

passes along the corridor, yawning. 

And one more unrecorded episode from Lenin's biography is 

lost from view. . . • 

• 

For a complete picture of the loyalists we must inquire into their 

conduct in all the basic areas of camp life. 

A. Attitude toward the Camp Regimen and toward the Prisoners' 

Struggle for Theii Rights. Inasmuch as the camp regimen 

has been established by us, the Soviet government, it must be 

observed not only willingly but conscientiously. The spirit of the 

regimen has to be observed even before this is demanded or 

requested by the supervisors. 

There are·some astonishing observatioJl9 in the work of that


same Y. Ginzburg: The women justify the cropping of their own 

hair (with clippers)! (Since the prison regimen requires it.) 

From a closed prison they were sent to die in the Kolyma. And 

they had their own explanation already prepared: "That means 

they trust us, that we will work there conscientiously!" 

And what the devil is the point of talking about any kind of 

struggle? Struggle against whom? Against our own people? Struggle--for 

what? For our personal release? For that you don't need 

to struggle, you have to ask according to rules. A struggle for the 

overthrow of the Soviet government? Shut your mouth! 

Among the camp inmates were ~ose who wantoo to struggle 

but could not, those who could but didn't want to, those who 

both could and wanted to (and did! when the time comes, we 

will tell about them too!). The orthodox Communists represented 

a fourth group: those who didn't want to and couldn't even if 

they had wanted to. All their preceding life had prepared them 

only for an artificially conditioned environment. Their "struggle" 

out in freedom had consisted in adopting and transmitting resolutions 

and instructions already approved by their higher-ups with 

the help of the telephone and the electric bell. In 'camp conditions . 

where the struggle most frequently was hand-to-hand, with unarmed 

prisoners marching against machine pistols, crawling on 

their bellies under fire, they were the "Sidor Polikarpoviches" or 

the "Dill Tomatoviches," frighteiling no one and good for nothing. 

And even less did these principled warriors for universal 

human happiness offer any hindrance to the depredations of the 

thieves, nor did they object to the dominance of the thieves in 

the kitchens and among the trusties. (Just read General Gorbatov. 

You can find it there.) For it was on the basis of their theory 

that the socially friendly thieves got such vast power in camp. 

They didn't prevent the thieves from plundering weak zeks in 

their presence, and they themselves did not resist being plundered 

by them. 

And all this was completely logical, there were no loose ends 

lying about, and no one disputed it. But then the time came to 

write our history, and the first half-stifled voices were raised 

about life in the camps, and the Goodthinkers looked back and 

were pained: how could that be? They who were so progressive, 

so conscientious-and they had not struggled! And they had not 


even known that there was a personality cult of StalinF And they 

certainly hadn't supposed that dear Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 

was an inveterate enemy of the people! 

And they had to hasten to spread some kind of muddied ~ersion 

to the effect that they had struggled. And all the snarling 

dogs on magazines who felt up to it blamed my Ivan Denisovich, 

the son-of-a-bitch, fOi' not waging a struggle. Moskovskaya 

Pravda (December 8, 1962) even reproached Ivan Denisovich 

for not going to the underground mee$gs arranged by the Com-. 

munists in camp, claiming he was unwilling to learn from thinking 

people. 

But what ki.n:d of delirium is this? What underground meetings? 

And why? To show the finger inside their pockets? And at 

whom would they have shown that finger-if from the junior 

jailer right on up to Stalin himself, one and all were that same 

Soviet pOwer? So when and with what methOds did they struggle? 

No one can tell US that. 

And what were they thinking about then-if all they allowed 

themselves to do was keep repeating that "everything that is real 

is rational"? What were they thinking of if their entire prayer 

was: "Do not beat me, please, 0 whip of the Tsar!" 

B. Relationship to the Camp Administration. What kind of 

attitude other than the. most respectful and frieildly could the 

Goodthinkers have toward the camp chiefs? After all, the camp 

chiefs were all Party members and were carrying out the Party's 

directives; and it was not their fault that "I" ("f' = the one and 

only innocent) had been sentenced and sent here. The orthodox 

Communists understood quite well that if they themselves had 

suddenly turned up in the pOsition of the camp chief they would 

have done everything just as he did. . 

Todorsky, 'whom today our whole press has proclaimed a 

camp hero (he is a former. seminarist who became a journalist, 

singled out by Lenin, and by the thirties for some reason installed 

as the Chief of the Air Force [?] Acad,emy, though he was not 

a flier), would even, according to Dyakov's account, talk to the 

7. In 1957'the head of the per8ODIle1 department of the Ryazan Province Education 

Department asked me: "What were you arrested for in 1945?" "For 

speakiJIg out against the cult of personality," I replied. "How can that be?" She 

was astonished. "Was there a cult of personality then?" (She was seriously 

under the i.mpression that the cult of. personality had been proclaimed only in 

1956. So ·how could it have been the(e ill 19451) 

•

The Loyalists I 34S 

supply chief (whom a slogger would pass without a glance) like 

this: "How can I serve you, Citizen Chief?" 

For the chief of the Medical Section Todorsky composed a 

synopsis of the Short Course of Party history. H Todorsky ever 

had any thoughts in the least unlike those in the Short Course, 

then where were his principles, how could he compose a synopsis 

exactly according to StaIin?8 And if he really thought precisely 

like that, then that's what is called ''perished comically." 

But it is too little to love one's camp bosses! What is required 

is that the bosses love you. It is necessary to explain, to the' chiefs 

that we are of the same stuff as you, and you have to take care 

of us somehow. And this is why the heroes of Serebryakova, 

Shelest, Dyakov, Aldan-Semyonov on every occasion, whether 

necessary or not, whether convenient or not, when the prisoner 

transport is being received, when the names are read out from 

the lists, declare themselves Communists. That is their application 

for a cozy spot! 

Shelest even thinks up a scene like this. At the Kotlas 'I'ransit 

Prison the roll is being called. "Party member?" asks the chief. 

(What tools is he writing this for? Where in .a prison list is there 

a column for Party mem~p?) "Member of the Communist 

Party of Bolsheviks," replies Shelest to the faked question. 

And one has to give the chiefs their due, D~ky men or 

Beria men: they heard. And •.. they arranged things for them. 

Yes, and were there not perh~ps same written' or at least oral 

directives: to make things easier for the Communists? For even 

in periods of the sharpest persecutions of the 58's, when they were 

being ousted from all jobs as trusties, former big-shot Communists 

for some reason kept their places. (For example, in KrasJag. 

Former member of the Military Council of the North Caucasus 

Military District Aralov remained as brigadier of the vegetable 

gardeners, and former General Ivanchik remained as a brigadier 

for. cottages, and former secretary of the Moscow Committee 

Dedkov also kept a soft spot.) But even without any directive, 

plain solidarity and plain self-interest-"You today, me tomor· 

row"-were bound to compel the MVD men to look after the 

true believers. 

' 

8. They will object: Principles are principles, but- somt:times it is necesSary 

to be elastic. There was a period when Ulbricht and Dimitrov instructed their 

Communist Parties to make peace with the Nazis and even support them. Well, 

we have nothing to top that: that's dillkctic8/ 

346 I THB GULAG AlI.CHIPBLAGO 

And the way it turned out was that the chiefs kept the orthodox 

Communists at their right hand so that they constituted a firmly 

establiShed privileged stratum in camp. (But this did not extend 

to the quiet rank-and-fil~. Communists who did not go to the 

chiefs to trumpet their faith.) 

Aldan-Semyonov writes quite straightf9rwardly that the Communist 

camp chiefs tried to transfer. Communist prisoners to 

lighter work. And Dyakov doesn't conceal it either: The newcomer 

Rom announced to the chief of the hospital that he w~ 

an Old BolShevik. And right away he was assigned as a Medical 

Section clerk-an enviable post! And the camp chief also gave 

orders that Todorsky was not to be removed from his post as a 

medical orderly. 

But the most remarkable case of all is recounted by O. Shelest 

in his Kolyma Notes: 8 A new MVD big shot arrived there 'and 

recognized the priSoner Zaborsky as his former corps commander 

from the Civil War. They wept on meeting. Go ahead, ask half 

my kingdom! And Zaborsky·agreed to accept "special food from 

the kitchen and to take as much bread as he needed" (in other 

words, to eat the bread of the sIoggers, since no one was going to 

prescribe a new ration norm for him), and asked only to be 

. given a six-volume set of Lenin to read in the evening by the 

light of the kerosene lamp! And that is how everything was arranged; 

during the day he was fed with stolen rations; in the 

evening he read Lenin! And that is how openly and with enjoJ-' 

ment vileness is glorified! . 

Shelest writes about some kind of mythical "underground 

politburo" of the work brigade (a bit too big a deal, wasn't it;" 

for a work brigade?), which managed to get hold of a loaf of 

bread from the bread-cuttirig room after hours, as well as a 

bowl of oatmeal. And what that means is that we have our own 

trusties everywhere. And also: Let's swipe what we can, Goodthinkers? 

That very same Shelest gives us his fuial conclusion: 

"Some survived thanks to their strength of spirit [those were 

. those orthodox Communists swiping bread and cereal-A.S.], 

while others survived thanks to an extra bowl of oatmeal [that 

was Ivan Denisovich]."lO 

9. Znamya (The Banrrer), 1964, No.9. 

10. Zabaikalslcy Rtzbochl (Trans-Baikal Worker), August 27. 1964.


Well, so be it. Ivan Denisovich had no friends among the 

trusties. Just tell us one thing: Who laid the bricks, who laid the 

bricks in the wall? Was it you, you hard-heads? 

C. Attitude toward Labor. It appears th"at on the whole the 

orthodox Communists were devoted to work. (Eikhe's deputy, 

even in a typhoid delirium, could calm down only when the nurse 

assured him that, yes, the telegrams on grain procurements had 

already been sent.)· It appears that on the whole they approved 

of camp labor also; it was necessary to the building of Communism, 

and without it the issuing of gruel to the whole horde 

of prisoners would have been undeserved. Therefore they considered 

it quite rational that persons refusing to go out to work 

should be beaten and imprisoned in the punishment block and 

sh9t in wartime. They considered it quite moral to be a work 

assigner, a brigadier, any kind of cattle driver or whip cracker. 

(And in this regard they disagreed with the so-called "honest 

thieves" and were in agreement with the ''bitches.'') 

Take, for example, the brigadier of the logging brigade Yelena 

Nikitina, a former secretary of the Kiev Komsomol Committee. 

Here is what they say about her: She stole from the output of 

her own brigade (of 58's) and traded it with the thieves. Lyusya 

Dzhaparidze (daughter of a Baku Commissar) bought her way 

out of work frOIp Nikitina with chocolate received in a food 

parcel. On the other hand, this woman brigadier refused to let the 

Anarchist Tatyana Garasyeva leave the woods for three days- 

until she had frostbite. 

Take Prokhorov-Pustover, also a Bolshevik, though not a 

Party member, who turned in zeks for deliberately failing to fulfill 

norms. (He used to report this to the chiefs, and the zeks got 

punished.) To the zeks' reproaches that he must realize it was 

slave labor, Pustover replied: ''That's a strange philosophy! In 

capitalist countries the workers struggle against slave labor; but 

we, even if We are slaves, work for a socialist state, not for private 

persons. These officials are only temporarily [?] in power. One 

blow from the people ... and they will disappear, but the people's 

state will remain." 

It's ... 'a jungle, the consciousness of an orthodox Communist. 

It's impOsSible-to make sense of it. 

And the only exception the Goodthinkers make is this reserva- 


tion for th~ves: It" would be wrong to use theni on general 

camp work, since it would then be difficult for them to preserve 

themselves for the future fertile leadership of the Soviet people. 

And anyway it would also be difficult for them to think during 

those years in camp, in other words to repeat in turn, oncAlfier 

another while. gathered in a circle, that Comrade Stalin, Comrade 

Molotov, Comrade Beria, and all the rest of the Party were right. 

And therefore, using all their efforts under the protection of 

the camp chiefs and with each other's secret help, they tried to 

get themselves places as trusties--in jobs where no knowledge or 

skills were required (none of them was a specialist), in calm. and 

quiet places farther from the main 'hand-to-hand camp struggle. 

And so they grabbed liold: Zakharov (Malenkov's teacher) 

as storage room clerk for personal property; the above-mentioned 

Zaborsky (Shelest him.self?)-at the clothing-issue desk; -the 

notorious Todorsky-in the Medical Section; Konokotin-as a 

medical assistant (though he was not a medical assistant' at all); 

Serebryakova-as a nurse (though sh~ was no nurse at all). And 

vo~oymeS-nadlA was also a trusty. 

The camp biography of Dyakov-the biggest . loud-mouth of 

all the loyalists-has been depicted by his own, pen and is truly 

astonishing. During the five years of his sentence he contrived 

to leave the camp compound just once-and then for only half 

a day, and during that half-day he worked for half an hour, 

cutting branches, and then the jailer said to him: '''You're fagged 

out, take a rest!" Half an hour in five years-not everyone gets 

away with that! For a certain length of time he malingered on 

the pretext of a rupture, and subsequently a fistula resulting from 

the rupture-but listen here, not for five years! To receive such 

golden jobs as medical statistician, librarian of the Cultural and 

Educational Section, and storage room clerk for personal possessions, 

and to stay in such jobs for your entire term-a bribe of 

fat bacon wasn't enough; most likely you had to sell your soul 

to the "godfather" as well. Let the old camp veterans be the judge 

of this. And Dyakov was not merely a trusty but an aggressive 

trusty; in the first version of his story,l1 before he was pu~licly 

shamed for it,12 he elegantly explained why an intelligent person 

I J. Zvevia, 1963, No.3. 

12. Lakshin in NOlIY Mlr, 1964, No.1.


ought to avoid the crude lot of the people· ("a chess tactic," 

"castling"-i.e., setting someone else in· the .,forefront of the 

battle). And this is the .person who has now taken it upon himself 

to become the principannterpretet of camp life! 

G. Serebryakova reports to us on her own camp· biography 

with careful omissions. There are said to be serious witnesses 

against her. I did not have the opportunity of checking this. 

Not only the authors themselves, but all the Test of the loyalists 

are also portrayed by this chorus of authors as being outside 

inanuallaboT-either in the hospital or in trusty jobs where they 

carry on their obscurantist (although somewhat updated) con-: 

,:ersations. These writers are not telling lies; they simply didn't 

have enough imagination to sho~ those hard-heads engaged in. 

labor useful to soci~y. (How can you portray it if you never 

worked yourself'1!) 

D. Attitude toward Escapes. The hard-heads themselves never 

attempted to esCape; you see, that would have been an act of 

struggle against the regime, a dislocation of the MVD, in other 

words an act of subversion of Soviet power. Furthermore, every 

orthodox Communist always had two or three petitions for 

pardon traveling around in the highest appeals jurisdictions. And 

an escape might be interpreted there, at the top, as lack of 

patience, even asJack of confidence, in tlJ,e highest jurisdictions. 

Anyway, the GoodthinkCl!ldidn't need "freedom in general." 

They didn't need the ordinary common freedom of humans and 

birdS. Every truth is concrete! And the only freedom they needed 

was freedom given them by the state, lawful freedom, duly signed 

and sealed, with a i"eturn to. their prearrest situation and privileges! 

Without that what use was· freedom? 

Well, and if they themselves didn't try to escape, then all the 

more did they condemn the escapes of others as. pure subversion 

of the MVD system and of economic construction. 

And if escapes were so detrimental, then it was probably the 

civic duty of. a loyal Communist, on learning of an escape attempt, 

to denounce it to the comrade security chief! Was it not 

logical? 

True, there were one-time members of the underground 

among them, and bold people from the Civil Warl But their 

dogma had transformed them into • . . political ri1fra1f. 

350 I THBGUL'AG ARCHIPBLAGO 

E. Attitude toward the Rest of the 58's. They never mingled 

with their comrades in distress. This would have been non-Party 

conduct. Sometimes in .secretamong themselves, and sometimes 

quite openly too (for there was no risk in it for them), they 

opposed themselves to the dirty 58's and attempted to regain 

purity. by holding themselves apart. It ·was precisely this, simplehearted 

mass that they had led out in freedom-where they never 

allowed it to utter a free word. And now when they turned out 

.. to be in the same cells with them, on equal terms, they still 

weren't in the least depressed by it and shouted as much as they 

pleased: ''That's what you deServe, scoundrels! You were all pretending 

out there in freedom! You are all enemies and they were 

right to arrest you! .Everything is in order. And everything is 

progressing toward the great victory!" (I am the only one unjustly 

imprisoned. ) 

And the loyalists seriously ascribed to the strength of the all-· 

conqueriJIg teaching the absence of any resistance to the path 

of their prison monologues (because the administration was 

always on the side of the orthodox Communists, and the }(R's 

did not even dare raise an objection since otherwise they would 

get second terms), to the strength of the all-conquering doctrine.13 

. 

It was with frank contempt, with commanding class hatred, 

that the orthodox. Communists gazed around them at all the 58's 

except themselves. Dyakov: "I thought with horror, 'Who. are 

we among here?' " Konokotin didn't wll11t to give an injection to 

a sick Vlasov man (though as a medical assistant it was his 

duty). But he self-sacrificingly contributed blood for a sick convoy 

guard. (Just like their free doctor Barinov: "First of all I 

am a Chekist, and then I am a physician." Now that is medicine!) 

Now we understand why "honest people are required" in the 

hospital (Dyakov)-:-80 as to know who to injec~ and who not. 

And they t:ransformed this hatred into action (how could they 

and why should they keep this class hatred to themselves?). In 

Shelest's account, Samuil Gendal, a professor-probably of Communist 

jurisprudence-provided the ammunition when the lack 

, 

13. Well, it could happen now and then that there was a different relationship 

of. forces. A certain prosecutor, iIilprisoned in Unzhlag, had to pretend 

to be an idint, and for more than a year too. That was his only means of saving 

himself from reprisals (he was imprisOned along with his "godchildren").


of any desire to go out to work on the .part of the Caucasian 

nationalities became apparent: the Moslem mullah must be suspected 

of sabotage. 

F. Attitude toward Stool Pigeons. Just as all roads lead to 

Rome, so all the preceding points lead us to this one: it was 

impossible for the hard-heads not to cooperate with the best and 

most sincere of the camp chiefs-the security chief. In their situatitm 

this was the most reliable .method of helping the NKVD, 

the state, and the Party. 

In addition it was very profitable. It was the best way of getting 

together with the higher-ups. Services rendered to the "godfather" 

did not go unrewarded. The only means of sticking for years on 

end in the best truSty soft spots inside,the camp compound was 

with the help of the "godfather." 

In one of the books 3;bout camp from this same orthodox Communist 

wave 14 here is the c~p system of values of the positive 

Communist Kratov, who is the .author's favorite: (1) Survive 

at any price, adapting to everything. (2) It is better for decent 

people'to become stool pigeons-because it's better than to leave 

it to scoundrels. 

But even if some orthodox Communist got stubborn and chose 

not to work for the "godfather," it was still hard for him to avoid 

that door. The security chief would certainly not omit to offer an 

affectionate invitation to all true believers, who loudly proclaimed 

their faith, asking in a fatherly tone: "Are you a Soviet person?" 

And the loyalist could not answer "No," and that meant "Yes." 

And if the answer was "Yes," then come and collaborate, 

comrade. There is nothing to hinder yoU.l~ . 

Only now, when distorting the entire history of the camps, 

are they ashamed to admit their collaboration. Not all of them 

got caught red-handed, like Liza Kotik, who dropped a written 

denunciation. But now someone has blurted out that security 

officer Sokovikov used to send off Dyakov's letters for him, bypassing 

the camp censor, and the only thing unsaid is: In exchange 

for what did he send them? That kind of friendship-- 


whence came.it? They remember to repon t1!.at the security officer 

Yakovlev advised Todorsky not to declare himself a Communist 

openly, but they don't go on to explain why he was concerned 

about this. . 

But this is only temporary. Already at hand is ~at glorious 

time when people will be able to fling restraint to the winds and 

admit loudly: "Yes! We ... were stoolies and we are proud of 

itl"16 . 

However-why this whole chapter? Why this whole lengthy 

survey and analysis of the loyalists? Instead we shall just write 

in letters a yard high: 

JANOS KADAR 

WLADYSLAW GOMULKA17 

They both underwent unjust arrest and interrogation with 

tonure, and both of them served time so-and-so many years. 

And the whole world sees how much they learned. The whole 

world has learned what they are wonk. 

\ 

14. Viktor Vyatkin, Chelovek Rozhdayetsya Dyazhdy (Man Is Born 

Twice), Part II, Magadan, 1964. 

15. Ivanov-Razumnik r:cal1s that they managed 'to expose three stoolies in 

their Butyrki cell, and all three turned out to be Communists. 

16. I wrote this at the beginning of 1966. and at the end of that same year 

I read Bukovsky's essay in Okryabr magazine, No.9, JUst as I predicted-they 

are already bragging openly. 

17. And now we can add also Gustav HIIIlIIk. (1972 fQ.otnote.)


Chapter 12 

• 

/ 

Knock, Knock, Knock. 

The Cheka-GB (no doubt a resonant, convenient, and concise 

. name for this organization and one which also preserves its continuity 

in time) would be an insensate leg incapable of carrying 

out surveillance over its people if it did not have a constant eye 

and a constant ear. In our technological years cameras and photoelectric 

elements often work in place of eyes, and microphones, 

tape recorders, and laser listening devices often replace ears. But 

for the entire epoch covered by this book almost the only eyes 

and almost the only ears of the Cheka-GB were stool pigeons. 

In the early years of the Cheka they were called, in a businesslike 

manner, secret collaborators (in contrast to staff employees 

who were in the open). In the manner of-those years this was 

abbreviated to the term seksoty," and that is how it passed into 

general usage. Whoever thought up this word (not supposing it 

would become so widely disseminated-and not taking due care) 

did not have the gift of perceiving it with unprejudiced ear and 

hearing even in its mere sound the loathsomeness woven into it 

-something more disreputable even than sodomy. And over the 

years it became colored with the yellowish-brown blood of betrayal-and 

there was no nastier word in the whole Russian 

language. 

But this word was used only in freedom. In the Archipelago 

they had their own words: in prison it was a "nasedka"-a "sit~ 

ting hen"-and in camp it was a "stukach"-a "knocker"......:stool 

pigeons all. However, just as many words of the Archipelago 

subsequently -moved out into the whole range of the Russian 

language and took over. the entire country, "so too the word 

"knocker" became in time a common concept. This reflected both 

the unity and the universality of the phenomenon itself. 

Without having the experience and without having thought 

the matter over sufficiently, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to 

which we are permeated and enveloped"by stool-pigeoning. Just 

as, without a transistor in hand, we do not sense in a field, in a 

forest, or on a lake that multitudes of radio waves are constantly 

pouring through us. 

It is difficult to school oneself to ask that constant question: 

Who is the stool pigeon among us? In our apartment, in our 

courtyard, in our watch-repair shop, in our school, in our editorial 

office, in our workshop, in our design bureau, and even 

in our police. It is difficult to school oneSelf, and it is repulsive 

to become schooled-but for safety one must. It is impossible 

to expel the stoolies or to fire them-they will recruit new ones. 

But you have to know them-sometimes in order to beware of. 

them; sometimes to put on an act in their presence, to pretend 

to be something you aren't; sometimes in order to quarrel openly 

with the informer and by this means. devalue his testimony 

against you. 

We will speak in a special chapter on freedom about the density 

of the network of informers. Many sense this density, but 

they do not make the effort to imagine the informer's face-his 

simple human face. And for this reason the network seems more 

enigmatic' and more fearsome than in actual fact it is. And yet 

me informer is that very same pleasant Anna Fyodorovna who 

lives next door and came in to ask you for some yeast and then 

ran to report at a prearranged contact point (perhaps a shop or 

a drugstore) that an unregistered visitor is in your apartment. 

It is that very same Ivan Nikiforovich whom you like so much, 

with whom you drank a glass of vodka, and he reported that you 

cursed because there was nothing in the store to buy and said 

the higher-ups were getting it all under the counter. You don't 

know informers face to face, and then you are surprised that the 

omnipresent Organs couid know that during the mass singing of 

the "Song on Stalin" you merely opened your mouth and didn't . 

waste your voice? Or that you didn't enjoy yourself at the November 

7 demonstration? Well, where were they, those penetrating 

and burning informer's eyes? But the informer's eyes can- be 

353

Knock, Knock, Knock. •• I 3SS 

a languid blue or hold a senile tear. It is not at all necessary for 

them to gleam wickedly. Do not expect that he will always be a 

villain who looks repulsive. He is an ordinary human being like 

you and me with a measure of good feelings, a measure of malice 

and envy, and with all the weaknesses which make us vulnerable 

to spiders. If the recruitment ofstool pigeons were entirely voluntary 

and based on enthusiasm, there would be few of them 

(as it was perhapS in the twenties). But the recruitment proceeds 

by means of entanglement and capture, and his weaknesses are 

what betray a person into this shameful service. And even those 

who honestly want to rid themselves of this sticky spiderweb, this ' 

second skin .-•• just can't, just can't. 

Recruitment is in the very air of our country; In the. fact that 

what belongs to the state is higher than what belongs to the individual. 

That Pavlik Morozov is a hero. That a denunciation is 

not a denunciation but a help to the person denounced. Recruitment 

is interlaced with ideology: for if the Organs wish it, then 

the recruited person must also wish for one and the same thing: 

our country's successful advance to socialism. . 

The technical side of recruitment is beyond praise. Alas, our 

detective comics do not describe these methods. The recruiters 

work at propaganda centers before elections. The recruiters work 

on the faculties of Marxism-Leninism. They call you in 

"There's some kind of commission there, go on in." The recruiters 

work in army units barely back from the front lines; a SMERSH 

man comes, and jerks in half your company one at a time; with 

some he merely talks about the grits and the weather, but some 

he assigns to keep watch on each other and on their commanders. 

A craftsman is sitting in his den repairing leather goods. A friendly 

man enters: "Cou14 you fix this buckle for me?" And qpietly he, 

adds:· "You are to shut down your shop right now and go out on 

the- street. There is an automobile there with license nUIilber 

37-48. Open tlle door without hesitation and get in. It will take 

you where yoq are to go." (At!4 wJlen you get there, the whole 

thing is rouru.e: "Are you a Soviet person? In that case you must 

help us.") And a shop like that is a wonderful place for gathering 

denunciations from citizens! And for a personal meeting with 

the ,Security chief there is the Sidorov apartment, second floor, 

three rings, from 6 to 8 P.M. 

The poetry of recruitment of stool pigeons still awaits its artist. 

356, I THB GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

There is a visible life and there is an invisible life. The.spiderwebs 

are stretched everywhere, and as we move we do not notice how 

they wind about us. ' 

• Selecting tools available for recruitment is like selecting master 

,keys: No.1, No.2, No., 3. No.1: "Are you a Soviet person?" 

No. 2 is to promise that which the person being recruited has 

fruitlessly sought by lawful means for many years. No. 3 is to 

bring pressure to bear on some weak point, to threaten a person 

with what he fears most of all. No. 4' ..• 

You see, it only takes, a tiny bit of pressure. A certain A.G. is 

called in, and it is well known that he is a nincompoop. And so 

to start he is instructed: "Write down a list of the people you 

know who have anti-Soviet attitudes." He is distressed and hesitates: 

"I'm not sure." He didn't jump up and didn't thump the 

table: "How dare you!" (Who does in our country? Why deal in 

fantasies!) '~Aha, so you are not sure? Then write a list of people 

you can guarantee are one hundred percent Soviet people! But 

you are guaranteeing, you understand? If you provide ,even one 

of them with false references, you yourself will go to prison 

immediately. So why aren't you writing?" "Well,I ... can't 

guarantee." "Aha, you can't? That means you know they are . 

anti-Soviet. So write down immediately the ones you know 

about!" And so the good and honest rabbit A.G. sweats and 

fidgets and worries. 'He has too soft a soul, formed before the 

Revolution. He has sincerely accepted this pressure which is 

bearipg down on him: Write either that they are Soviet or that 

they are anti-Soviet. He sees no third way out. 

. A stone is not a human being, and even stones get crushed. 

There are more master keys in freedom because life is more 

varied. In camp they are of the simplest sort. Life has been simplified, 

laid bare, and the threading of the screw and the diameter 

of its head are well known. No. I, of course, reinains: "Are you 

a Soviet person?" It is very applicable to the loyalists; and the 

screwdriver will never slip, and the screw head starts immediately 

and keeps going. No.2 also works very well indeed: a promise 

to have the prisoner taken off general work and to have trusty 

'work arranged for him in the camp compound and to see that 

he gets supplementary grits, and some pay, and has his term 

reduced. That's all life~ And every such little step preserves life! 

(During'the war years stool-pigeoning really got to be cOnspicuously 

small-time stuff; objects got more expensive and people

Knock, Knock, Knock . ~.! I 357 

got cheaper. Souls were sold for just a pack of tobacco.) And 

No.3 works even better: We will take your trusty status away! 

We will send you out to general work! We will transfer you to a, 

penalty camp! Every one of those steps was a step toward death. 

- And the person who could not be coaxed upward by a piece of 

bread could still shudder and beg for mercy if he was pushed into 

the abyss. 

This dots not mejUl that finer, more sldllful work did not- exist 

or was 'never needed--..,great ingenuity was sometimes required. 

Major Shikin had to gather material against the prisoner 

Gertsenberg, a Jew. He had grounds for thinking that Anton, an 

inexperienced, seventeen-year-old German lad, could provide the 

material he wanted. Shikin called in yo~g Anton and began to 

water the Nazi shoots implanted there: how repulsive.the Jewish 

nation was and how it had destroyed' Germany. Anton got 

steamed up and betrayed Gertsenberg. (And why wouldn't the 

Communist Chekist Shikin have become. under altered circumstances, 

a dependable interrogator for the Gestapo']) 

Or take Aleksandr Fillipovich Stepovoi. Before his arrest he 

was a soldier in the MVD armies and ~e bad been arrested under 

Article 5&..1::- 

He was, lUJtan orthodox. Communist at all, just an ordinary 

lad from the working classes. And in camp he came to be 

1. This is the only chance I will have to tell the story of his arrest. He was 

conscripted as a boy and sent oft· to serve in the MVD armies. First---mto 

battle against the Ukrainian partisans, the "Banderlsts."· Having received information 

(from informers) as to when the "Banderists" were coming out of 

the forest to attend mass, the MVD surrounded the chnrch and took them as 

they came out. (On the basis of photographs.) Later they also guarded (in 

civilian clothing) people's deputies in Lithuania when the latter went tp election 

meetings. ("One of them was very bold and always declined to have a 

guard with him!") Later stiD they guarded a bridge in Gorky Province. They 

themselves mutinied over poor food and as pupishment were sent to the 

Turkish border. But by this time Stepovoi had already been imprisoned. He 

used to draw pictures as a hobby, even ou the covers of notebooks in. political 

indoctrination courses. On one oCcasion he drew a pig, and then someone Pext 

to him asked: "Can you draw stalinT' hI can." And he drew a pictnre of Stalin 

on the spot. And he turned in his notebook to be checked by the instructor. 

That was already quite enough to warrant his arrest, but beyond that, at target 

practice in the presence of a general he had scored seven out of seven buD'& 

eyes at a distance of four hundred yards and got leave to go home. When he 

returned to his unit, he reported there were no fruit trees left. All the orchards 

had bI!en cut down because of. the tax on them imposed by Zverev. At his 

court-martial in. Gorky Province he shouted: "Ob, you scoundrels! ·If I am an 

enemy of the people, why don't you try me in front of everyone-what are 

you hiding fromT' Then •.•. Burlepolom and Krasnaya Glinka (a cruel strictregimen 

camp consisting only of S8's who ~orked on tunneling). 

358 I _THE -GULAG ARCH-IPELAGO . 

ashamed of his fonner service and carefully concealed it, realizing 

that it would be dangerous· for him if it became known. So how 

was he to be recruited as an informer? Well, he was to be 

recruited with just that: "We will let it be known that you are 

a 'Chekist:' " They would even wipe their asses with their ow~ 

banner-anything in order to recruit! (He insists that he nonetheless 

stood up against them.) 

Someone else might, as the saying goes; 1?e nothing at all, 

but merely want to be a stoolie-someone like that could be had 

without any difficulty. For anoPter it might be necessary to cast 

the bait several times before he swallowed it. To anyone who 

wavered and squirmed on the grounds that it was difficult for 

him to gather exact information, they would explain: "Give us 

what you- have and we will check it out." "But if I'm not at all 

sure?" "What does that mean-that you're a real enemy?" And 

in the end they would explain quite honestly: "What we need 

is five percent truth and the rest can be your imagination." (The 

Dzhida secilrity chiefs.) 

But sometimes it did happen that the "godfather''ll would keep 

trying and trying without landing his prey either on his third 

try or on his fifth. This WIl4 rare, but it happened. TheIl the "godfather" 

had his spare noose left: a signature on nondisclosure. 

Nowhere--either in the Constitutipn or in the Code----did it ever 

say that such signatures exist or that we are obliged to give 

them, but .". . we have gPt used to everything. How can we . 

refuse this either? We certainly will give all of them. (Yet, at the 

same time, if we didn't give them, if, on crossing the threshold, 

we were to announce to one and all our conversation with the 

"godfather," then indeed the demonic -strength of the Third 

Section would be dispelled. It is on our cowardice that their 

secrecy and they themselves are founded!) And ilien a liberating 

and happy notation is put into the prisoner's camp file: "Not 

to be recruited." That is after try "ninety-six" or at least "eightyfour," 

but it is a long time before we learn about it, if we survive 

at all. We can make a guess, however, from the fact that all that 

scum subsides from us and never clings to us again. 

However, most often of all the recruitment succeeds. Crudely 

2. The word "!tum" in Dal's dictiolllll')' is given as meaning "one in a state 

of spiritual kinship, the godfather of one's child by christening." And so the 

transfer of this term to the camp security officer was very precise and quite 

in the spirit of the language. But with that touch of irony customary with the 

zeks.

Knock. Knock. Knock. . ... I 359 

and simply, they pur on more and more pressure, so much that 

you can neither beg nor growl your way out of it. 

And soon afterward the new recruit brings in a denunciation. 

And as offen as not the denunciation tightens the noose of a 

second term around someon,e's neck. 

And camp squealing turns out to be the strongest form of camp 

struggle: "You c'ro~ today, me tomorrowl" 

Out in freedom stool-pigeoning was a totally safe occupation 

for an entire half-century or forty years; there was no answering 

threat from society, and neither expos)Jl'e nor punishment could 

O(:Cur. 

In the camps it was !IOmewhat different. The reader will recall 

how the stool pigeons were. exposed and exiled to Kondostrov 

by the Administrative Sectiop. of Solovki. But, for decades after, 

things were seemingly free and easy for the stool pigeons. But 

at occasional rare intervals and in occasional rare pla9Cs a small 

group of resolute and energetic zeks would join forces and 

coIitinue the Solovetsky tradition in hidden .form. Sometimes 

they would beat up (and kill) a stool.Jligeon on the pretext of 

lynch law: a crowd stirred up against a tbiefcaught stealing. 

(In camp terms lynch law was almost lawful.) Sometimes-as in 

Camp No. 1 of Vyatlag during the war.,-the work trusties would 

expel the most malevolent of the stool pigeons from their own 

construction project "for the sake of efficiency." It was hard for 

the security chief to help in that kind of case. Other stool pigeons 

caught on and clammed up. . 

High napes were placed in the front-line soldiers when they 

arrived-they would go after the stoolies! Alas, the military 

reinforcements were a disappoinbnent to the camp warriors; outside 

their army these warriors, artillerymen, and scouts went 

totally sour and were good for nothing. 

But what was required was more tolling of the bell, more 

passage· of tiIne,before the extermination of stoolies would get 

under way in the Archipelago . 

• 

I do not have enough material for this chapter. For some reason 

old camp hands are not v.ery eager to . tell me about how they 

were recruited. I will therefore speak about myself. 

360 'I THE Gl11>-AG ARCHIPELAGO 

Only with my later camp experience, as I became a veteran, 

did I look back and comprehend how pettily, how insignificantly, 

I had begun my term. Having become used, in my officer's pelt, 

to an undeservedly high position among those around me, in 

camp, too, I kept climbing into positions of some kind and immediately 

falliI;lg out of them. And I clung tightly to that peltto 

my field shirt, britches, greatcoat. How hard I tried not to 

exchange it for the dark camp camouflage! In new conditions I 

made the mistake of the new recruit. I drew attention to myself 

in a new locality. 

And the sniper's eye of the very first "godfather," at Novy 

Iyerusaliro, noticed me right off. And at Kaluga Gates also, just 

as sOOn as I got out of the painters' brigade and became an 

assistant to the norm setter, I dragged out that uniform once 

again-oh. how one wants to be masculine and handsome! 

Furthermore, I lived in that chamber of monstrosities where 

even the generals didn't doll up like that. 

I had "forgo~en to wonder ab

Knock, Knock, Knock. •. I 361 

But he very much liked to conduct an intellectual conversation 

in o.ur room-so as to show that he understood our delicate 

souls, and so that we ourselves would value the delicacy of his 

soul. So it was this timl>-'-he was telling us something fresh about 

the life of the city, something about a new film, and suddenly, 

imperceptibly.to the others, he clearly motioned to me-to go 

out into the corridor. 

I went out, not uilderstanding. After a certain number of 

polite sentences so it wouldn't be obvious, Senin also got up and 

came after me. And he instructed me to go mediately to the 

Qffice of the security officer. The stairway leading there led nowhere 

else-so one would not run into anyone on it.· There sat 

the old hoot owi. 

I had not yet met him. I went with a sinking heart. What was I 

afraid of! I was afraid of what every camp inmate fears: that he 

might start to paste a second term on me. Not a year had passed 

since ~y interrogation. And everything within me still ached 

from the mere sight of an interrogator behind a desk. And what 

if my previous case were to be delved into· again: a few pages 

more from my diary, maybe some letters? 

Knock, knock, .knock. 

"Come in." 

I opened the d~or. A small, cozily furnished room, as if it were 

not in--Gulag at all. There was even enough room for a small 

divan (maybe he was bringing our women in here too) and for a 

"Philips" radio on a book stand. Its bright-colored little tuning 

"eye" gleamed and some soft, very pleasant melody was pouring 

gently out of it. I had become quite unused to such purity of 

sound and such music. I instantly softened: somewhere life was 

going on! My Lord, we had grown so used to beli~ving that our 

own life was life itself, J>ut it was going on somewhere out there, 

somewhere out there. 

"Sit down." 

On the desk was a lamp beneath a calming shade. The security 

chief sat· in an armchair behind the. desk-like Senin,' he had 

that same intelligent, dark-haired, impenetrable appearance. My 

chair was also semiupholstered. How pleasant it was if only 

he wouldn't begin to accuse me of. anything, if only he wouldn't 

begin dragging all that old nonsense out again. 

But no, his voice was not hostile at all. He asked me in general 

about my life, how I was feeling, how I was adjusting to the 

362 I THE GULAG AllCHIPELAGO 

camp, whether it was comfortable for me in the trusties' room. 

No, that was not how they began an interrogation. (And where 

had I heard that beautiful melody?) 

And then came a quite natural. question-it could even have 

been. out of just plain curiosity: 

''Well, and after everything that has happened to you, after 

everything you have suffered, are you still a Soviet person? Or 

not?" . 

Well? What could I"answer? You, my descendants, will never 

be able to- understand this: what should I answer now? I hear, 

yes," I can hear you normal, free people, shouting at me from 

1990: "Go ahead and send him to --I [Or perhaps my 

.descendants will no l~nger express themselves in that kind_of 

language? I think-in Russia-they will!] So they imprisoned 

you, they cut your throat, and they still want you to be a Soviet 

person!" 

In actual fact, after aU Diy prisons, after all my encounters 

With others, when I was engulfed With information from the whole 

world-how on earth could I still be a Soviet person? Where 

and when has anything Soviet ever been able to Withstand .completeness 

of information? " 

And if I had already been re-educated as much by prison as I 

had been educated by it, I ought to have cut him off then and 

there, of course: . ''No! Go to --I rm tired of beating my 

brains out over you! Let me rest after work!" 

But then we had all grown up to be obedient fellows! After 

all, when it came to ''Who's against? Who abstains?" there was 

absolutely no way ·you could raise your hand, no way. So how . 

could even a convicted man twist his tongue around the words 

"I am not a Soviet person"? 

''In the 080 decree it stated that I was anti-Soviet," I said 

evasively. 

"The OSO!" And he waved it away Without. the slightest 

respect. "But you yourself, what do you feel? Are you still a 

Soviet person? Or have you changed, and become embittered?" 

That melody continued to play softly and so purely, and our 

syrupy, sticky, and inconsequential conversation didn't stick to it. 

Lord, how pure and how beautiful human life. can be, but because 

of the egotism of those who have power we are never able to 

attain it. Was it Moniuszko? No, it wasn't Moniuszko. Or

Knock, Knock, Knock. •. I 363 

Dvorak? No, it wasn't Dvorak? Go away and let me be, dog, and 

let me listeD. 

''Why sbould I be. embittered?" I acted astonished. (Why 

indeed? For ten letters or so--eight years, and that was not even 

a full year for each letter. "To be embittered" was quite out of 

the question-it would already smell of a new term.) 

"And so that means you are Soviet?" the security chief pressed 

at me, sternly but encouragingly. 

The important thing was not to answer sharply. Not to disclose 

what I had become by then. Say now you are anti-Soviet, and a 

new camp case would be set in motion, and they would solder 

a new term onto you, very easily. 

"In your own heart, inside-how do you think of yoUrself?" 

It was so fearsome-winter and blizzards, going to the Arctic. 

And here I had everything well arranged. I had a dry place to 

sleep, and it was warm, and there were even bedclothes. In 

Moscow my wife came to visit me and brought parcels .... Where 

would I bfl sent? And why should I go if I could stay behind? ... 

What was there shameful in saying, "Soviet"? The system was 

socialist. 

"I, uh, for myself ... yes, well .. : Soviet. ; ." 

"Aha, so you are Soviet! Now that's something else again:' 

The secUrity chief was gladdened. "So now you and I can talk: as 

two Soviet people. That means you and 1 share the same ideology 

-we have common goals. [Only ~ur lodgings were different.] 

And you and I must act in unity. You help us and we will help 

you." 

I felt I had already slipped downward .... And there was still 

that music. .. . . And he kept tossing and tossing his neat little 

nooses: I had to help him keep in touch with what was going on. 

I might choose to overhear certain cCIDversations. I was to report 

on them .... 

Well, that was something I would never do. Coldbloodedly inside 

myself, I knew that qUite well! Whether I was Soviet or not 

was immaterial: Don't sit around waiting for me to report political 

conversations to you! However--

Knock, Knock, Knock ~ •. I 365 

Well, that was different, the thieves were enemies, pitiless 

enemies, and_against them maybe any methods were good. . . . 

Anyway, good or not, the main thing was that it was a good out 

for me. At least it seemed so. 

"I could. That I could do." 

You said it! You said it! And the devil only needs one little 

word! And instantly a clean sheet of paper fluttered onto the table 

in front of me: . 

PLEDGE 

I, the undersigned, pledge to report to the camp security officer any 

escapes planned by prisoners .... 

"But we were talking only about the thieves!" 

"And who escapes except the thieves'? And how am I going to 

write the word 'thieves' in an _ official document'? That's siang. 

It makes sense just as it is." 

"But the entire meaning is cbanged!" 

''No, now I see that you are not one of us, and that it is necessary 

to talk with you in an entirely different way-and not 

here." 

Oh, what fearsome words! ''Not here." When there is a 

. blizzard outside the window, when you are a trusty and live in . 

a friendly chamber of monstrosities. Where is that "not here"'? 

In Lefortovo'? And what does it mean, "in an entirely different 

way"'? Anyway, in the last analysis, there hadn't been a single 

escape during my time in this camp, it was about as likely as a 

_ meteorite falling. And if there were going to be escapes, what 

fool would talk about them ahead of time'? And that meant I 

would never know. And that meant there would be nothing for 

me to report. In the last analysis, this wasn't a bad way out of 

it. ... But. .. 

"Couldn't we really get along without that paper'?" 

"Thafs the system." 

I sighed. I reassured myself with unspoken qualifications and 

put lDY signature down, selling my soul. Selling my soul to save 

my body. All done'? Can I go'? . 

Ob, not at all. There was also one "on nondisclosure." But 

farther up the same piece of paper. 

• 

366 I THE GULA,GARCHIPE,LAGO 

"You must choose Ii pseudonym for yourself." 

A pseudonym? Aha, you mean a conspiratorial nickname! 

Yes, yes, yes, of course. All informers have to have a conspiratorial 

nickname! Good Lord, how swiftly I had fallen. He ,had 

outplayed me after all. The chessmen had moved, and it was 

, checkmate. 

And all my imagination fled and my Inind went blank. I can 

always find names for dozens of heroes. Now I couldn't think 

up even one little nickname. Mercifully' he suggested to me: 

"Well, what about Vetrov?" 

And finally I wrote, at the end of the "pledge": "Vetrov." 

Those six letters are branded in shameful grooves on my memory. 

After all, I had wanted to die among human beings! I had 

been prepared to die among human beings! How did it tum out 

that I had remained to live among curs? 

And the comInissioner tucked my pledge away in the safethis 

was his output for the night shift. And he courteously explained 

to me that I must not come to his office, that this would 

cause suspicion. The jailer Senin was a trustworthy person and 

all my reports (denunciations!) could be transmitted secretly 

through Senin. 

That's how birds are snared. Beginning with the tiny little 

claw. 

That particular year I probably wouldn't have been able to 

stop myself at that edge. After all, if you can't hold on to the 

mane, you'll not be able to hold on by the tail either. Once you 

start sliding down, you'll slide down further. 

But something helped me to hold back. Whenever I met 

Senin he used to urge me on: "Well, well?" I used to spread my 

hands: I had heard nothing. I was regarded with hostility by the 

thieves and was unable to gli?t close to them. And then, as if out 

of spite, although there had been no escapes· at all, all of a 

sudden a lousy thief 'escaped from our camp. All right then, report 

on something else! On the brigade! On the room! Senin 

insisted. I kept insisting that I hadn't promised to report on 

anythmg else. (By now it was already getting on toward spring.) 

Nonetheless I had gained a little by giving too narrow a pledge. 

, And at this point I was jerked 'out of the camp and into a 

sharashka on special orders from the Ministry. And that's how I

Knock, Knock, Knock. . • 367 

got by. Never again did 1 have to sign as "Vetrov." But even today 

1 shudder when. 1 encounter that name. 

Oh, how difficult it is, how difficult it is, to become a human 

beingl Even if you have survived the front and bombing and 

been blown up by land mines, that's still only the very beginning 

of heroism. That is still not the whole thing ••.. 

Many years passed. 1 had been in sharashkas and Special 

Camps. I bore myself independently, eve~ more impudently, aDd 

never again did the Security Section spoil me wiJh its good offices, 

and I grew used to living with the gay conviction that on my case 

file they had stamped: "Do not recruit!" 

1 was sent into exile. 1 lived there for nearly three years. The 

dispersal of the exiles had already begun too, and sever8I of 

the exiled nationalities had already been liberated. By this time 

those of us who remained used to joke when we went to report in 

at the commandant's headquarters. The Twentieth Congress· had 

also passed. And everything seemed gone once and for all, 1 

made jolly plans for my return to European Russia as sOon· as 

I was released. And suddenly when 1 was leaving the school 

courtyard one day. a well-dressed Kazakh (in civilian clothes) 

greeted me by name and patronymic, and hurried over to shake 

my hand. 

"Let's go and talk." He nodded amiably in the direction of the 

commandanfsheadquartenL 

"1 have to have my lunch." I waved him away. 

"And will you be free later this evening?" 

"1 won't be free this evening either." (In my. free evenings I 

was .writing a novel.) 

"Well, when will you he free tomorrow?" 

He had caught me. And 1 had to fix an appointment for the 

next day. 1 tho,ught he would have something to say about my 

case being reconsidered. (Just before this 1 had made a mistake. 

1 had written a. petition to t)Je higher-ups, just like die orthodox 

Communists, which meant 1 had got myself into the situation. of 

a petitioner. That was something State Security couldn't let by!) 

But the province Security officer had triumpbaDtly taken over the 

office of the district MW chief, had locked the door, and was 

clearly preparing for a conversation that was to last many hours, 

and that was rendered all the more complicated by the fact that he 


didn't speak Russian very well. Despite this, by the end of the 

first hour I realized that he was interested not in reconsideration 

of my case but in recruiting me as an informer. (Evidently, with 

the release "f a section. of their exiles, the -ranks of the informers 

had grown sparse.) 

I found all this both ridiculous and vexing: vexing because I 

regli.rded each half-hour as very preciouS, and ridiculous because 

.in March, 1956, this kind of conversation grated on me with its 

bad timing like the clumsy scraping of a knife across a plate. Very 

gently I tried to explain this untimeliness to him, but he would 

have none of it. Like a serious bulldog, he tried not to let up on 

his grip. Every sort ·of relaxation in the Soviet Union always 

reaches the provinces after a delay of three, five, or ten years .. 

And it is only tightening up which is instantaneous. He hadn't 

the slightest idea of what 1956 was to be like! Then I reminded 

him that the MGB had been aboUshed, but he eagerly and happily 

demonstrated to me that the KGB was exactly the same thing, 

with the same personnel, and the same tasks. 

But by that year I had already developed some sort of cavalier 

carelessness toward their glorious institution. I felt that it would 

be quite in the spirit of the epoch to send him exactly· where he 

and his colleagues deserved. I feared no direct consequences for 

myself-they couldn't happen during that glorious year. And it 

would have been great fun simply to leave, slamming the door 

behind me. 

But I stopped to think first. What about my manuscripts? For 

whole.days at a time they lay there in my tiny hut, protected only 

by a weak little lock, yes, and concealed on the inside with an 

additional small ruse. At night I would get them out and write 

away. If I were to enrage the KGB, they would look for a chance 

of revenge, something compromising, and they might just find 

my manuscripts? . 

No, I simply had to bring this to an end peaceably. 

Ob, my country! Oh, my accursed country, where in its very 

freest months the human being most inwardly free could not 

permit himself to antagonize the gendarmes!.,. . . He could not 

fling in their faces everything he thought. 

"I am gravely ill, that's ·the problem. My illness doesn't allow 

me to look around and snoop. I have enough troubles! Let's 

leave it at that." 

'

Knock, Knock, Knock. •. " 369 

Of course, this was a pitiful way of getting out of it. Because 

I was recognizing their actual right to recruit. And what I should 

have done was to ridicule and deny that right. It was a refusal 

.•. on my knees. 

And he still didn't accept it, the smart aleck! For half an hour 

more he kept trying to prove to me that even a gravely ill person 

also ought to collaborate! But when he saw that I was totally 

immovable; he took another tack: 

"Do you have an extra certificate?" 

''What kind?" 

"Certifying that you are so ill." 

"Yes, I have a certificate." , 

"Then bring it to me." 

_ Yes, he had to have his "output," too, for his own workdayl 

Justification that I had been correctly selected as a c~date, 

but that they had not known that this person was gravely ill. 

The certificate was required not merely for him to read, but to 

be stapled into the case file, and thereby to end the whole !lttempt. 

I gave him the document, and with that we were quits. 

Those were the freest months in our co~try in a whole halfcentury 

I 

' 

. And what about the person who had no medical excuse? 

• 

The skill of the security officer consisted in immediately picking 

the right master key. In one of the Siberian camps, a native of 

one of the Baltic countries, U., who knew Russian well (which 

was why the choice fell on him), was summoned "to the chief." 

And there in ~e chiefs office sat an unfamiliar captain with an 

aquiline nose and the hypnotic gaze ofa cobra. "Shut the door 

tight!" he warned very gravely, as if enemies were about to. burst 

in, wi,thout lowering his burning eyes, wh!ch stared at U. from 

beneath shaggy brows-and inside U. everything wilted, something 

burned' and suffocated him. Before- summoning U., of 

course, the captiUn had gathered all the information available 

about bini, and without even having seen hin1 had, determined 

that keys 1, 2, 3, and 4 would all be of no avail, that here only 

the last and strongest key could be used, but he kept staring for 

several minutes into U.'s unclouded, defenseless eyes, checking 


him out with his own eyes and at the Same time depriving him 

of his will power, and already invisibly raising above him that 

which would immediately descend upon him. 

The security chief took time for only the briefest introductiQn, 

speaking not· in the tone of an abstract political catechism, but 

tensely, as if something were aboU:t to'explode today or tomorrow 

right there in their own camp. ''Do you know the world is divided 

into two camps, and one will be defeated, and we know very well 

which it will be? Do you know which? So that's how it is: if you 

want to survive, you must b~ away from the doomed capitalist 

shore and swim across to the new shore .. Are you familiar with 

Latsis' To the New Shore?"· And he added a few more such 

phrases, and did not for a moment lower his hot threatening 

gaze, and having finally confirmed in his own mind the number 

of the key, he then asked with alarmed serioUsness: "And what 

about your family?" And one by one, without ceremony, he 

reeled off all their names! And he knew the ages of the children 

too! That meant he had already famiJiarized himself with the 

family-that was very serious! "You understand, of course," he 

pronounced hypnotically, "that you and yOUl' family are a single 

whole. If you make a mistake and perish, your family will immediately 

perish too. We do not permit the families of traitors 

[his voice grew more meaningful] to go on living in the healthy 

Soviet . environment. So make your choice between the two 

worlds! Between life ana death! I am offering you an opportunity 

to pledge to assist the Security Section! In case you refuse, your 

entire family will be immediately imprisoned in camp! In our 

hands We have full power [how right he was!] and we are not 

accustomed to backtrack on our decisions. [Once again he was 

right!] Since we have chosen you, you will work with us!" 

All this was loosed suddenly on U.'s head. He was not prepared 

for it. He would never have thought of it. He had considered 

that only scoundrels became informers. But that they might 

approach him? A blow-direct, without waste motion, without 

the cushion of time-and the captain was waiting for his anSwer, 

and was about to, explode right then, and then everything would 

explode! And U. took thought: What is there that is really impossible 

for them? When have they ever spared anyone's family? 

They didn't hesitate to liquidate the "kulak" families right down 

to tiny children, and they even wrote about it proudly in th~ news-

Knock, Knock, Knock • •• I 371 

papers. U. had also seen the work of the Organs in 1940 and 

1941 in the Bliltic States, and had gone to the prison yards to 

look at the pile of executed prisoners during the Soviet retreat. 

And in 1944 he had heard the Baltic broadcasts from Leningrad. 

Like the captain's gaze at this moment, they had been full 

of threats and had breathed revenge. They promised reprisals 

against all, against every last person who had aided the enemy.a 

And so what was there to compel them to show mercy now? 

To ask for it was useless. It was necessary to choose. (But here is 

what u., himself a victim of the myth of the Organs, did not yet 

J;ealize: That. machine possessed no such magnificent coordination 

and interlinked responsiveness ~ would ensure that when he - 

refuseP today to become an informer in a Siberian camp his 

family would be hauled off to Siberia in a week's time. And there 

was one more thing he didn't realize either. No matter how poor 

his opinion of the Organs, they were even worse than he thought: 

the -hour would soon strike when all these families, all these hun,,-_ 

dreds of thousands of families, would troop off into common 

exile, where they would perish, without any reference to how the 

fathers were behaving in camp.) 

Fear for himself would not have shaken him. But U. pictured 

his wife· and daughter in camp conditions-in these same barracks 

where lechery wasn't even curtained off, where there was 

no defense whatever for any woman under sixty. And ••• he 

shuddered. The correct key had been picked. None other would 

have opened the door, but this one did. 

But he still dragged things out a bit: "I have to fhink it over." 

"All right, think it over for three days, but don't talk it over with 

even a single person. You will be shot for disclosure" (And U. 

goes to get advice from a fellow national-the very same, in fact, 

against whom he is being told to write ~ first denunciation, and, 

in fact, they edit it together. For this friend admits it is impossible 

to risk his family.) 

On his second visit to the captain, U. signs the devil's receipt, 

and receives his assignment and his contact: he is not to go to 

3. But every teacher, every factory worker, every streetcar couductor, everyoue 

who had had to earn his bread with his work, had oue aud all aided the 

enemy. The ouly persODS _who didu't aid the enemy were the speculator at the 

market aud the partisau iu the forest! The extreme tODe of these thoughtless 

Leniugrad broadcasts pushed several hundred thousauds of persous iuto flight 

into Scaudiuavia iu 1944. 

372 I THBGULAG AllCHIPBLAGO 

the office any more; he is to cOl\duct all his business through the 

unconvoyed trusty Frol Ryabinin.. . 

This is an inlportant constituent of the work of the camp 

security chief: These "residents"· are scattered throughout the 

camp. Frol Ryabinin is the most vociferous of all "among the 

people," a prank,ster. Frol Ryabinin is a popular personality. 

Frol Ryabinin has some sOrt of under-the-coUnter work or other, 

and a separate cabin of his own, and always has money. With the 

security chiefs help he has got into the depths and currents of 

camp life, and he hovers in them, comfortably at home. Such 

"residents" as he are the. cables on which the whole network 

hangs. 

Frol Ryabinin instructs U that he must transmit his reports in 

a.dark nook. ("In our work the main thing is conspiracy.") He 

summons him to his private quarters: ''The captain is dissatisfied 

with your report. You have to write so that there's material 

against a person. I'm going to teach· you how." 

And this stinking snoot teaches the wan, depressed intellectual 

U how to write filth against people! But U.'s downcast look leads 

Ryabiilin to his own conclusion: it is necessary to liven this ninny 

up, to heat him up a little! And he says to him in a friendly way: 

''Listen, your life is a hard one. You sol)letimes want to buy 

something to add to your bread ration. The captain wants to help 

you. Here, take this!" And he takes a fifty-ruble bill from his billfold. 

(And this is the captain's! And that is how free of auditors 

they are, and maybe they are the only ones in the whole country!) 

And he shoves it at U 

And suddenly, at the sight of this pale-green toad which has 

been pushed into· his hands, ~ the spells cast by the cobra captain, 

all the hypnosis, all the constraint, even all the fear for his 

family-all that has taken place, its entire meaning, is objectified 

in this loathsome· bill with its greenish- phlegm, these commonplace 

Judas silver pieces. And without even stopping to think 

what will happen to his family, with the natural gesture of warding 

off filth, U. pushes away the fifty-ruble bill, and the tmcomprehen9ing 

Ryabinin shoves it at him again, and U. throws it 

on the floor and gets up, already relieved, already free both of 

the moral· teachiDgs of Ryabinin and of his signature given to the 

captain, free of those paPer conditioris in the· face of the great· 

duty of a human being! He leaves without asking permission! He

· Knock, Knock, Knock • •• I 373 

walks through the camp compound on legs light as air: "rm freel 

rmfree!" . 

Well, not entirely so. A stupid security chief would have kept 

on ha~g him in. But the cobl'a captain understood that the 

stupid Ryabinin bad spoiled the threading, had used the wrong 

key. And the pincers no longer sought out U. in that camp, and 

Ryabinin would pass him without greeting. U. calmed down and 

was glad. And at this poin~ they began to send the 5S's off to the 

Special Camps, and he was sent to Steplag. And he thought that 

this prisoner transport would break the chain all the more. 

But not at all! A notation evidently remained in his file. At his 

new place U. was suriunoned' to a colonel: "They tell me you 

agreed to work with us but that you do not deserve our trust. 

Perhaps they didn't explain it to you clearly." 

However, tIfis colonel inspired no fear in U. And, in addition, 

U.'s family, like the families of many of the inhabitants of the 

Baltic States, had been rese.ttled in Siberia by this time. There 

was no doubt about i~: he had to get them off his back. But what 

pretext could he use? 

The colonel turned him over to a lieutenant for the latter to 

work him over. And this lieutenant jumped up and down and 

threatened and promised while U. kept trying to find a way of . 

forcefully and decisively turning them down. 

Though he was an enlightened and irreligious person, U. discovered 

that the· only defense against them was to hide behind 

Christ. This was not very honest, but it was a SJU'C thing. He lied: 

''I must tell you frankly that I had a Christian upbringing, and 

therefore it is quite impossible for me to work with youl" 

And that ended it! And all the lieutenant's chatter, which had 

by then lasted many hours, simply stopped! The lieutenant understood 

he had drawn a bad number. ''We need you like a dog needs 

five legs," he exclaimed petulantly. "Give me a written refusal." 

(Once again ''written"!) "And WIite just that, explaining about 

your damned god!" 

Apparently they have to close the case of every infotJ!:\Cf ~tl1 

a separate piece of paper, just as they open it with on, The 

reference to Christ satisfied the lieutenant completely: none of 

ytiruces~eht officers would accuse him subsequently of failing to 

use every effort he could. 

374 I TBB GULAG ARCBI'PBLAGO 

And does the unpartial reader not find that they fi(:e from 

Christ like devils from the sign of the cross, from the beDs calling 

to matins? ' - - 

And that is why our Soviet regime. can never come to terms 

with Christianity! And the French Communists' promises to the 

contrary mean nothing.

Chapter "13 

• 

Hand Over Your 

Second Skin Too! 

Can yOll .... behead a man whose head has already bCC9 cut off? 

You can. Can you skin the hide oft a man when he has already 

been skinned? You canl 

This was all invented in our camps. This was all devised in 

the .Archipelago! So let it not be said that the brigade was our 

only Soviet I;Qntnbution to world penal science. Is not the second 

camp term, a contnbution too? The waves which surge into the 

Archipelago from outside do not die down there and do not 

subside freely, but are pumped through the pipes of the second 

interrogation. 

Oh, blessed are those pitiless tyrannies, those despotisms, those , 

savage countries, where a person once arrested cannot be arrested 

a second timel Where once in prison he cannot be reimprisoned. 

~hW a person, who has been tried cannot be tried again! Where 

a sentenced person cannot be sentenced again! 

But in our country everything is permissible. When a man is 

fiat on his back, irrevocably doomed and in the depths of despair, 

how convenient it is to poleax him again! The ethics of our prison 

chiefs are: "Beat the man who's down." And the ethics of our 

Security officers are: "Use corpses as steppingstonesl" 

We may take it that camp interrogations and camp court were 

bom on Solovki, although what they did there was' simply to 

push them into the bell-tower basement and finish them oft. 

During the period of the Five-Year Plans and of the metastases, 

.. 


they began to employ the second camp term instead of the bullet. 

For how otherwise, without second (or third or fourth) terms, 

could they secrete in the bosom of the Archipelago, and destroy, 

all those marked down for destniction? 

The generation of new prison terms, like the growing of a 

snake's rings, is a form of Archipelago life. As long as our camps 

thrived and our exile lasted, this black threat hovered over the 

heads of the convicted: to be given a new term before they had 

finished the first one. Second camp terms were handed .out every 

year, but most intensively in 1937 and 1938 and during the war 

years. (In 1948-1949 the burden of second terms was transferred 

outside: they overlooked, they missed, prisoners who should have 

been resentenced in camp-and then had to haul them back into 

camp from outside. These were even called repeaters, whereas 

those resentenced inside didn't get a special name.) 

And it was a mercy-an automated mercy-when, in 1938, 

second camp terms were given out without any second arrest, . 

without a camp interrogation, without a camp court, when the 

prisoners were simply called up in brigades to the Records and 

Classification Section and told to sign for their second terms. 

(For refusing to sign-you were simply put in punishment block, 

as for smoking where it wasn't allowed.) And they also had it 

all explained to them in a very human way: uWe aren't telling 

you that you are guilty of 1mything, but just sign that you have 

been informed." In the Kolyma that's how they gave out tenners, 

but in Vorkuta it was even less severe: eight years plus five years 

by the 080. And it was useless to try to get out of it as if, in the 

dark infinity of the Archipelago, eight was in any way distinct 

from eighteen, or a tenner at the start from a tenner at the end 

of a sentence. The only important' thing was that they did not 

wal~ and tear your body today. 

Now we can understand: The epidemic of camp sentences in 

1938 was the result of it directive from above. It was there at 

the top that they suddenly came to their senses and realized that 

they had been handing out too little, that they had to pile it on 

(apd shoot some too)-and thus frighten the rest. 

But the epidemic of camp cases during the war was stimulated 

by a happy spark from below too, by the features of popular 

initiative. In all likelihood there was an order from above that 

during the war the most colorful and notable individuals in each 

375

Hand Over Your Second Skin Too! I 377 

35. Captain Lebedev, a "godfather" 

camp, who might become centers of rebellion, had to be suppressed 

and isolated. The bloody local boys immediately sensed 

the riches in this vein-their own deliverance from the front. 

This was evidently guessed in more than one camp and rapidly 

taken up as useful, ingenious, and a salvation. The camp Chekists 

also helped fill up the machine-gun embrasures--but with other 

people's bodies. - 

378 I THE GULAG ,ARCHIPELAGO 

Let the historian picture to himself the pulse of those years: 

The front was moving east, the G~ans were around Leningrad, 

outside Moscow, in Voronezh, on the Volga, and in the foothills 

of the Caucasus. In the rear there were ever fewer men. Every 

healthy male figure aroused reproachful glances. Everything for 

the "front! There was no price too big for the government to pay 

to stop Hitler. And only the camp officers (and their confreres 

in State Security) were well fed, white, soft-skinned, idle-all 

in their places in the rear. (In IDustration No. 35-this camp 

. "godfather," for example. How badly be needed to stay alive.) 

And the farther into Siberia and the North they were, the quieter 

things were. But we must soberly 1l1)derstand: theirs was a shaky 

prosperity. Due to end at the first outcry: Bring out those rosycheeked, 

smart camp fellows! No battle experience? So tl\ey had 

ideology. And they would be lucky to end up in the police, or 

in the behind-the-lines "obstacle" detachments,· but it could 

happen otherwise; otherwise it was into officer battalions and be 

thrown into the Hattle of Stalingrad! In the summer of 1942 they 

picked up whole officer-training schools and hurled them into 

the front, uncertified, their courses unfinished. All the young and 

healthy cQnvoy guards had already been scraped up for the front. 

And the camps hadn't fallen apart. It was all right. And they 

wouldn't fall apart if me security officers were called up either! 

(There. were already rumors.) 

Draft deferment-that was life. Draft deferment-that was 

happiness. How could you keep your draft deferment? Easyyou 

simply had to prove your importance! You had to prove that 

if it were not for Chekist vigilance the camps would blow apart, 

that they were a caldron of seething tar! And then our whole 

glorious front would collapse! It was right here in the camps in 

the tundra and the taiga that the white-chested security chiefs 

were holding back the Fifth Column, holding back Hitler! This 

was their contribution to victory! Not sparing themselves, they 

conducted interrogation after interrogation, exposing plot after 

plot. 

Until now only the unhappy, worn-out camp inmates, tearing 

the bread from each other's mouths, had been fighting for their 

lives! But now the omnipotent Chekist security officers shamelessly 

enteJ'ed the fray. "You croak today, ~e tomorrow." Better 

you should perish and put off my death, you dirty animal.

Hand Over Your Second Skin Too! \379 

And so they cooked up a "rebel group" in Ust-Vym: eighteen 

persons! They wanted, of course, to disarm the Militarized Guard, 

get its weapons away from it (half a dozen old rifles)! What then? 

It is hard to picture thegcale of the plan: They wanted to raise 

the entire North! To march on Vorkutal On Moscow! To join 

up with Mannerheim! And telegrams and reports flew to the top. 

A big plot had been neutralized. There was unrest in the camps! 

The security staff had to be strengthened. 

And what was this? Plots were discovered in every campi More 

plots! Still more! Ever larger in scale! And ever broader! Ob, 

those perfidious last-Ieggers! They were just feigning that they 

could be blown over by the wind-their paper-thin, pellagrastricken 

hands were secretly reaching for the machine guns! Oh, 

thank you, Security Section! Oh, savior ·of the Motherland-the 

Third Section! 

And a whole gang sat there in that Third Section in the Dzhida 

camps of Buryat-Mongolia: Chief of the Security Operations 

Section Sokolov, Interrogator Mironenko; Security Officers Kalashnikov, 

Sosikov, Osintsev: We've fallen behind! Everyone else 

has plots, and we have fallen behind! We do have a major plot, 

of course, but what kind? Well, of course, "the Militarized Guard 

is to be disarmed"; yes; of course, "they are going abro8d"-after 

all, the border was close and Hitler was far away. With whom 

should they begin? 

And just as a well-fed pack of hounds tears a sick, skinny, and 

mangy rabbit to bits, so did this sky-blue pack hurl itself On the 

unfortunate Babich, former Arctic explorer, former hero, now 

a last-Iegger covered with ulcers. It was he who at the outset of 

the war had nearly turned over the icebreaker Sadko to the Germans--so 

all the threads of the plot were obviously in his hands. 

It was his scurvy-racked dying body that was to save their wellnourished 

ones . 

. "Even if you are a bad Soviet citizen, we will still make you 

do as we wish, you will kiss our boots!" "You don't remember? 

We will remind you!" ''You can't write? We'll help your' "You 

want time to think? Into the punishment cell on ten and a half 

ounces!" - 

And here is what another security man told him: "rm very 

sorry. Of course, you will come to understand later on that it 

would have been sensible to do as we demand. But it will be too 

380 THE GULAG ARCHIP'E LAGO 

late, when we can break you like a pencil between our fingers." 

(Where do they get this imagery? Do they think it up themselves 

or is there a selection of such phrases in Chekist textbooks composed 

by some unknown poet?) 

And here is the interrogation by Mironenko. Hardly had they 

brought Babich in than he was hit by the smell of tasty food. 

And Mironenko made him sit quite close to the steaming meat 

borscht and cutlets. And as though unaware of that borscht and 

those cutlets or even that Babich could see them, he gently cited 

dozens of arguments to relieve his conscience and justify not only 

the possibility but also the necessity of giving false testimony. 

He reminded Bab~ch amiably: 

"When you were arrested the first time, in freedom, and tried 

to prove your innocence, you did not after all succeed, did you? 

No, you didn't succeed! Because your fate had already been 

decided before your arrest. That's how it is now. That's liow it 

is now. Well, well,.eat the lunch. Go ahead: eat it before it gets 

cold .... If you are not stupid, we will get along very well. You 

will always be well fed and provided for .... Otherwise ... " 

And Babich shuddered! Hunger for life had turned out to be 

stronger than the thirst for truth. And he began to write down 

everything dictated to him. And he slandered twenty-four people, 

of whom he knew only four! And for the entire period of the 

interrogation he was fed, but never given enough, so that at the 

first sign of resistance they could lean on his hunger again. 

Reading the record of his life written before his death sends 

shivers down your spine: from what heights and into what depths 

can a brave man fall! Can all of us. . . . 

And so it was that twenty-four people who knew nothing about 

anything were taken to be shot or to get new terms. And before 

the trial Babich was sent off to a state farm as a sewage-disposal 

worker, and then "gave testimony at the trial, and then was given 

a new tenner, with his previous term erased, but he died in camp 

before completing his second term. 

What about the gang from the Dzhida Third Section? Well, 

will someone investigate that gang!? Anyone! Our contemporaries! 

Our descendants! ... . 

And-you? You thought that in camp at least you could unburden 

your soul? That here you could at least complain aloud: 

''My sentence is tOQ long! They fed me badly! I have too much

Hand Over Your Second Skin Tool· I 381 

work!" Or you thought that here you could at least repeat what 

you got your term for? But if you say any of this aloud-you 

are done for! You are doomed to get a new "tenner." (True, once 

a new camp tenner begins, at l~t the first is erased, so that as 

it works out you serve not twenty, but some thirteen or fifteen 

or the like .... Which will be more than you can survive.) 

But you are sure you have been silent as a fish? And then you 

are grabbed anyway? Quite right! They couldn't help grabbing . 

you no matter how you behaved. After all, they don't grab for 

something but because. It's the same principle according to which 

they clip the wool off freedom too. When the ThirCi Section gang 

goes hunting, it picks a list of the most noticeable people in the 

camp. And that is the list they then dictate to Babich. • . . , 

In camp, after all, it is even more difficult to hide, everything 

is out in the open. And there is only one salvation for a person: 

to be a zero! A total zero. A zero from the very beginning. 

To stick you with a charge presents no problem. When the 

"plots" came to an end after 1943 (the Germans began to J,"etreat), 

a multitude of cases of ''propaganda'' appeared. (Those 

"godfathers" still didn't want to go· to the front!) In the Burepoiom 

Camp, for example, the following selection was available: 

• Hostile activity against the policy of the Soviet Communist 

Party and the Soviet government (and what it was you 

can guess for yourself!) 

• Expression of defeatist fabrications 

• Expression of slanderous opinions about the material 

situation of the workers of the Soviet Union (Telling the truth 

was slander.) . 

• Expression of a desire (!) for. the restoration of the capitaliSt 

system 

• Expression of a grudge against ~e Soviet government 

(This was particularly impudent! Who are you, you bastard, 

to nurse grudges! So you got a "tenner" and you should have 

kept your mouth shut!) 

A seventy-year-old former Tsarist diplomat was charged with 

making the following propaganda: . 

• That the working class in the U.S.S.R. lives badly 

• That Gorky was a bad writer (") 


To say that they had gone too far in bringing these charges 

against binI is out of the question. They always handed out sentences 

for Gorky; that's how he had set himself up. Skvortsov, 

for example, in Lokchimlag (near Ust-Vym), harvested fifteen 

years, and among the charges against binI was the following: 

• He had unfavorably· contrasted the proletarian poet 

Mayakovsky with a certain bourgeois poet. 

That's what it said in the formal charges against binI, and it 

was enough to get him convicted. And from the minutes of the 

interrogation we can establish who that certain bourgeois poet 

was. It was Pushkin! To get a sentence forPushkin-that, in 

truth, was a rarity! ' 

After that, therefore, M~inson, who really did say in the tin 

shop that "the U.S.S.R. was one big camp," ought to have sung 

praise to God that he got off with a "tenner." 

As ought those refusing to work who got a "tenner" instead 

of execution. 1 

But it was not the number of years, not the empty and fantastic 

length of years, that made these second terms so awful-but how 

you got them. How you had to crawl through that iron pipe in 

the ice and snow to get them. 

It would seem that arrest would be a nothing for a camp 

inmate. For a person who had once been arrested from his warm 

domestic bed-what did it matter to be arrested again from an 

uncomfortable barracks with bare bunks? But it certainly did! 

In the barracks the stove was warm and a full bread ration was 

1. It was such a pleasure to .hand out second terms, and it lent such meaning 

to the lives of the Security Operations Sections, that when the war was 

at an end, and it was no longer possible to believe either in plots or even in 

defeatist moods, they began to paste on terms under nonpolitical articles. In 

1947, in the agricultural camp Dolinka, there were show trials in the compound 

every Sunday. They tried potato diggers for baking some potatoes in bonfires; 

tbey tried people for eating raw carrots and turnips in the fields. (What 

would some nobleman's serfs have said if tried for something like that?!) And 

for all this they handed out terms of five and eight years under the recently 

issued great "Decree· of Four-sixths." One former "kulak" was already coming 

to the end of his "tenner;' He was in charge.of the camp bul1 calf, and 

he couldn't any longer stand to see it starve. He fed this camp bul1 calf-not 

binlself!-with beets-and got eight years for it. Of course, a "social1y friendly" 

zek would not have undertaken to feed the bull calf! And that is how in our 

country, over decades, natural selection operated, deciding who would live 

and who would die.

Hand Over Your Second Skin Tool I 383 

given. But here came the jailer and jerked you by the foot at 

night. "Gather up your things!" Oh, how you didn't want to go! 

People, people, I love you .••. 

The camp interrogation prison. What kind of a prison will it 

be and how can it possibly advance your confession if it isn't 

worse than your own camp? All these prisons are invariably.cold. 

H they aren't cold enough, then they keep you in the cells in just 

your underwear. The famous Vorkuta Number Thirty (a term 

borrowed by the zeks from the Chekists, who called it that bec;ause 

of its telephone number, 30), a board barracks beyond 

the Arctic Circle, was heated with coal dust when it was 40 

degrees below zero outside, one washtubful a day, and not because 

they lacked coal in Vorkuta, of course. And they tormented 

them with more than that-they didn't issue them matches. And 

for kindling there was one little chip the size of a pencil. (Incidentally, 

escapees who had been caught were kept in this Number 

Thirty stark naked. After two weeks anyone who had survived 

was given_ summer clothes but no padded jacket. And there 

were no mattresses and no blankets. Reader! Try it, just try to 

sleep like that for one night! In the barracks it was approximately 

40 above.) . 

And that was how the prisoners were kept throughout the 

several months of interrogation! Even before that, of course, they 

had been worn down by many years of hunger and by slave labor. 

And now, it was much easier to finish them off. What did they 

feed them? As the Third Section instructed: in some places eleven 

and a quarter ounces a day, and in some places ten and a half 

ounces, and in Number Thirty seven ounces of bread, sticky as 

clay, a piece little bigger than a matchbox, and once a day a 

thin gruel. 

But you still wouldn't get warmed up right away even if you 

signed everything, if you admitted everything, if you surrendered, 

and if you agreed to spend another ten years in this dearly beloved 

Archipelago. Until your trial they moved you from Number 

Thirty to the Vorkuta "interrogation tent"-no less famous. This 

was a plain ordinary tent, yes, and full of holes to boot. It had no 

floor. The floor was the Arctic earth. Inside it was seven by 

twelve yards, and in the center was an iron barrel instead of a 

stove. There were single-decker lattice bunks on one level and 

those next to the stove were always occupied by the thieves. 

384 I THB GULAG AllCHIPELAGO 

The political plebeianS . . . had to sleep around the outside or 

-on the ground~ You would lie there and see the stars above you. 

And you would pray: "Oh,the sooner they try me the better! The 

sooner they sentence me the better!" You awaited that trial as a 

deliverance. (People will say: No person can live like that beyond 

the Arctic Circle, unless he is fed chocolate and dressed in furs. 

But in our country ..• he can!- Our Soviet man, our Archipelago 

native ... c~l Arnold Rappoport spent many months like that 

'the Provincial Assizes kept delaying its journey from Naryan 

Mar.) 

or here, for your delectation, is one more interrogation 

prison-the penalty camp of OrotUkan in the Kolyma, 315 miles 

from Magadan. It was the winter of 1937-1938. A wood and 

canvas-settlement, in other words, tents with holes in them but 

overlaid with rough boards. The newly arrived prisoner transport, 

a bunch of new interrogation fodder, saw even before being led in 

through the door: every tent in the settlement was su"ounded 

with piles of frozen corpses on three out of four sides, except 

where the door was. (And this was not to terrify. There was 

simply no way out of it: people died, and snow was six feet deep, 

and beneath it there was only permafrost.) And then came the ' 

torment of waiting. You had to wait in the tents until you were 

transferred to the log prison for in~rogation. But they had 

taken on too much and too many. They had herded in too many . 

rabbits from the whole of the Kolyma, and the interrogators 

couldn't cope with them, and-the majority of those brought here 

were simply destined to die without even getting to their first 

interrogation session. The tents were congested, there was no 

room to stretch out. You lay there on the bunks and on the floor, 

and you lay there for many weeks at a time. ("Do you really call 

that congestion?" responds the Serpantinka. "Here they wait to 

be shot-true, only for several days 1lt a tim~but standing the 

whole time in a shed, so that when they give them a drink-that 

is, throw pieces of ice over their heads from the doorway-it is 

so crowded that it is impossible to stretch out a hand to catch 

the pieces, and instead you have to try to catch them with your 

mouth.") There were no baths, nor any outdoor exercise periods 

in the fresh air. Bodies itched. Everyone scratched frantically, 

and everyone kept on searching for lice in padded cotton britches, 

padded jackets, shirts, underwear shorts, but they searched with-


out undressing because of the cold. The big, white, bloated lice 

reminded you of plump suckling piglets. And when you crushed 

them, they splashed your face, and your nails were covered with 

ichor. 

Before lunch the duty jailer would shout through the door: 

"Are there any stiffs?" "Yes." "Wh!:Jever wants to earn a bread 

; ration--drag them out!" They were dragged out and placed on 

top of the pile of corpses. And no one bothered to ask the TUlmes 

of the dead! The bread rations were issued on the basis of the . 

total count. And the ration was ten and a half ounces. And one 

bowl' of gruel a day. And they would also issue humpbacked 

salmon rejected by the sanitation inspector. It was very salty. You 

were very thirsty after it, but there was never any hot water, 

never. Just barrels of icy water. You had to drink many cups to 

quench your thirst. G.~.M. used to try to persuade his friends: 

"Tum down the humpbacked salmon-that's your only salvati()nl 

You spend all the calories you get from your bread on warming 

that icy water inside you!" But people simply couldn't turn down 

a piece of free fish-so they kept on eating it and then drinking. 

And they trembled from inner cold.· M. himself didn't eat it, so 

it's he who now tells us about Orotukan. 

It was so congested in the barracks-yet it kept steadily thinning 

out. After a certain number of weeks the survivorS of the 

barracks were driven outside for a roll call. In the unaccustomed 

daylight they saw one another: pale, their faces overgrown with 

stubble, beaded with nits, . hard, dark blue lips, sunken eyes. They 

called the roll by file cards. The answers were barely audible. 

The cards to which there was no response were put aside. And 

that is how they established who was left there in the piles of 

corpses--avoiding interrogation. 

All who survived Orotukan say they would have preferred the 

gas chamber. 

The interrogation? It proceeded according to the plans of the 

interrogator. And those in whose cases it didn't are not about to 

tell us. As the security chief Komarov said: "All I need is your 

right hand-to sign the testimony." Well, yes, there were tortures, 

of course, homemade and primitive. They would crush 

a hand in the door, and it was all in that vein. (Try it, reader.) 

The court? Some sort of camp collegium-this. was a per- 

386 I l'HE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

manent camp court subordinate to the Provincial Court, like the 

people's court in the district. Legality was triumphant! And there 

would be witnesses, bought by the Third Section for a bowl of 

gruel. 

In Burepolom the brigadiers often testified against their brigade 

members. The interrogator-a Chuvash named Krutikovforced 

them to. "Otherwise I will remove you ~rom your position 

as brigadie~ and send you to Pechora!" And so a brigadier named 

Nikolai Ronzhin from Gorky stepped forward to testify: ','Yes, 

Bernshtein said that Singer sewing machines were good and that 

Podolsk sewing machines were 'bad." Well, that was enough! 

Enough at least for the assizes of the Gorky Provincial Court 

(Chairman Bukhonin, and two local Komsomol girls, Zhukova 

and Korkina). Ten years! 

In Burepolom there was also a smith, Anton Vasilyevich 

Balyberdin (local, from Tonshayevo), who used to be a witness 

at all c~p trials. Should you run into him, please shake his honest 

hand! 

Well, and then finally ... there was one more prisoner transport 

to fJDOther camp, to make sure you didn't take it into your 

head to get even with the witnesses against you. This was a short 

transport-four hours or so on an open flatcar on the narrowgauge 

railroad. 

And then it was into the hospital. And if you could still put 

one foot in front of the other, tomorrow, first thing in the morning, 

you'd be pushing a wheelbarrow. 

All hail the Chekist vigilance which saved us from military 

defeat, and saved the security officers from the front! 

• 

Few ~ere shot during the war (if we exclude the republics from 

which we retreated in haste), and for the most part new terms 

were passed instead: what the Chckists needed was not the annihilation 

of these people, merely the disclosure of their crimes. 

The' convicted could then labor or they could dic-,-this was a 

matter of economics. 

In 1938, there was an extreme; impatience to shoot I;)n the part 

of the higher-ups! They shot as many as they could in all the 

camps, but they shot the most in the Kolyma (the "Garanin" 

executions>. and in Vorkuta (the "Kashketin" executions).


The Kashketin executions were tied up with the skin-grating 

name of the Old Brickyard. That was what the station of the 

narrow-gauge railroad twelve miles south of Vorkuta was called. 

After the "victory" of the Trotskyite hunger strike in March, 

1937, and the deception perpetrated on its participants, the 

"Grigorovich Commission" was sent from Moscow for investigation 

of the strikers. South of Ukhta, not far from the railroad 

bridge across the Ropcha River in the taiga, a long stockade was 

. set up, and a new isolator-Ukhtarka-was created. This is where 

the interrogation of the Trotskyites of the southern section of the 

trunk railroad line was conducted. And commission member 

Kashketin was sent to Vorkuta itself. Here he dragged the Trotskyites 

through the "interrogation tent" (they were flogged with 

whips!). And without even insisting that they admit their guilt, 

he drew up his "Kashketin lists." 

In the winter of 1937-1938 they began assembling at the Old 

Brickyard'the Trotskyites and also the "detsisty"-the "democratic 

centralists"-from various concentration points-from 

tents at the mouth of the Syr-Yaga, from Kochmes, from Sivaya 

Maska, from Ukhtarka (some of them without any interrogation 

whatever). Several of the most prominent were taken to Moscow 

in connection with trials there. By April, 1938, the rest of them 

at the Old Brickyard numbered 1,053 persons. In the tundra, 

off to the side of the narrow-gauge railroad, stood a long old shed. 

They began to settle the strikers in it, aDd then, as additional 

groups arrived, they also set up next to it two tattered old tents, 

which had nothing to reinforce them, for 250 persons each. We 

can guess what the conditions were from what we know about 

Orotukan. In the middle of the six-by-twenty-yard tent lik~ that 

stood one gasoline drum in place of a stove, for which one pail 

of coal per day was allotted, and in addition the zeks would throw 

their lice in to add a little to the heat. A thick layer of hoarfrost 

covered the inside of the canvas wall. There were not enough 

places on the bunks and the zeks took turns lying down and walking. 

They were given ten and a half ounces of bread a day and 

one bowl of gruel. Sometimes, though not every day, they were 

given a piece of codfish. There was no water and they were given 

pieces of ice as part of the ration. It goes without saying, of 

course, that they were never able to wash themselves and that 

there was no bath. Patches of scurvy appeared on their bodies. 

But what made this more oppressive than Orotukan was that 

388 I THE GULAG ARCHIPEI:AGO 

theY'sicked on the Trotskyites the camp storm troopers-thieves, 

murderers included, who had been sentenced to death. They were 

instructed that these political bastards had to be squeezed, in 

return for which the thieves would get relaxation of their sentences. 

The thieves set to with a will to carry out instructions so 

pleasant and so completely to their taste. They were named 

monitors and assistant monitors-the nickname of one has been 

preserved: "Moroz" ("Frost")-and they went around with 

clubs, beating up these former' Communists and mocking them 

in every way they knew: compelled them to carry them p~gyback, 

grabbed their clothes, defecated in them, and burned them 

in the stove. In one tent the politicals hurled themselves on the 

thieves and tried to kill them, but the thieves raised an outcry, 

and the convoy opened fire from outside to protect the "socially 

friendly" elements. 

It was, above all, this humiliation by the thieves that broke , 

the unity and will of the recent strikers. 

At the Old Brickyard, in cold and tattered shelters, in the 

wretched unwarming stove, the revolutionary gusts of two decades 

of cruelty and change burned themselves out. 

And the Russian tradition of political struggle also, it seems, 

lived out its last days. 

Nonetheless, thanks to the eternal human trait of clinging to 

hope, the prisoners in the, Old Brickyard waited to be sent to 

some new project. For several months they had endured' agonies 

there, and it was quite unbearable. And then truly, early on the 

moming of April 22 (we are not fully certain of the date,-but 

that, after all, was Lenin's birthday), they began to assemble a 

prisoner transport-of two· hundred persons. Those summoned 

. were given their bags, which they placed on sledges. The convoy 

guards led the column east, into the tundra, where there was no 

. dwelling nearby, though Salekhard lay in the distance. The thieves 

rode in back on the sledges'with the things. Those who remained 

behind noticed only one unusual thing: 'occasionally bags would 

fall off the sledges, ~ut no one bothered to pick them up. 

The column marched along in good spirits. They were expeCting 

some kind of new lire, some kind of new activity, which, even 

if fatiguing, would be no worse than all that waiting. The sledges 

had fallen far be~d. The convoy itself began to fall behindno 

longer ahead or at their sides 1?ut only at their rear. So what! 

This laxity of the convoy was a good sign.

Hand Over Your Second Skin Tool I 389 

The sun shone. 

Then all of a' sudden, rapid machine-gun fire began to descend 

on the black moving column of zeks, from invisible emplacements, 

from out of the blinding snowy wastes. Some prisoners 

started to fall, while others still stood, no one understanding a 

thing. . 

Death came in sunny and snowy garments, innocent, merciful. 

All this was a fantasy on the subject of the coming war. From 

snow-covered temporary emplacements the murderers rose up in 

their Arctic cloaks (they say the majority of them were Georgians). 

and ran to the column and finished off with revolvers all 

those still alive. Not far off were the previously prepared pits to 

which the newly arrived thieves began to drag the corpses. To 

the chagrin of the thieves, the dead men's things were burned. 

On the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth of April, another 

760 persons were shot in the same place in the same way. 

And ~ety-thre were transported back to Vorkuta. These 

were the thieves, and, evidently, the stoolie provocateurs.! 

Such were the main "Kashketin" execu~ons.8 

But some transports of condemned zeks arrived too late, and 

they continued to arrive with five to ten people at a time. A ere;. 

tachment of killers would receive them at the Old Brickyard 

station and lead them to the old bathou~to a booth lined with 

three or four layers of blankets inside. There the condemned 

. prisoners were ordered to undress in the snow and enter the bath 

naked. Inside, they were shot with pistols. In the course of one 

and a half months abou~ two hundred persons were destroyed in 

this way. The corpses were burned in the tundra. . 

The Old Brickyard shed and Ukhtarka were burned down: 

(And the "bath" was put onto a railroad flatcar and taken to the 

19lst milepost of the narrow-gauge railroad and dumped. There . 

it was found and studied by my friend. It was saturated with 

blood on the inside, and its walls were riddled with holes.) 

But the executions of the- Trotskyites did not end there. Some 


thirty or so others who had stilI not been shot were gradually assembled 

and then executed not far from Number Thirty. But this 

time it was done by other people. And the first detachment of 

killers, those Chekists and convoy guards, and also those thieves, 

who had participated in the "Kashketin executions," were also 

shot soon afterward as witnesses. 

In 1938 Kashketin himself was awarded the Order of Lenin 

"for special services to the Party and the government." And one 

year later he was shot in Lefortovo. 

Nor could one say this was the first time this had happened 

in history. 

A. B--v has told how executions were carried out at Adak 

-a camp on the Pechora River. They would take the opposition 

members "with their things" out of the camp compound on a 

prisoner transport at night. And outside the compound stood the 

small house of the Third Section. The condemned men were 

taken into a room one at a time, and there the camp guards 

sprang on them. Their mouths were stuffed with something soft 

and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then 

they were led out into the courtyard, where harnessed carts 

were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled on the carts, from 

five to seven at a time, and driven off to the "Gorka"-the camp 

cemetery. On arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already 

been prepared and buried alive. Not out of brutality, no. It 

had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them, it was 

much easier to ~ope with living people than with corpses. 

This work went on "for many nights at Adak. 

And that is how the moral-political unity of our Party was 

achieved. 

2. The names of some of them were Roilman, Istnyuk, Model

392 I THE GULAG A,RCHIPELAGO 

Chapter 14 

• 

Changing One's Fate! 

o~ defend yo~lf in that savage world was impossible. To go 

on strike was suicide. To go on hunger strikes was useless. ' 

And as for dying, there would always be time. 

So what was left for the prisoner? To break out! To go change 

one's fate! (The zeks also called escape "the green prosecutor." 

It was the only popular prosecutor among them. Like all the 

other prosecutors, he, too, left m~y cases in their previouS situa; 

tion or in an even worse situation than'before--but sometimes he 

freed them outright. He was the green forest. He was the bushes 

and the greensward.) 

Chekhov used to say that if a prisoner was not a philosopher 

who could get along equally well in all possible circumstances 

(or let. Us put it this way: who could retire into himself) then he 

could not but wish to escape and h,e ought to wish to. 

He could not but wish to! That was the imperative of a free 

soul. True, the natives of -the Archipelago were far from being 

like that. They were much more submissive than that. But even 

among them there were always those who thought about escape 

or who were just about to. The continual escapes in one or another 

place, even those that did not succeed, were a true proof 

that the energy of the zeks had not yet been loSt. 

Here is a camp compound. (IDustration No. 36.) It is well 

guarded; the fence is strong and the inner cordon area is reliable 

and the watchtowers ~ set out correctly-every spot is open to 

view and open to fire. B,ut all of a sudden you grow sick to death 

of the thought that you are condemned to die right here on this 

36. Camp compound 

bit of fenced-off land. So why not try your luck? Why not burst 

out and change your fate? This impulse is particularly strong at 

the beginning of your term of imprisonment, in the first year, and 

it is not even deliberate. In that first year when, generally speaking, 

the prisoner's entire future and whole prison personality are 

being decided. ~ater oil this impulse weakens somehow; there is 

no longer the conviction that it is more important for you to be 

out there, and all the threads binding you to the outer world 

weaken, and the cauterizing of the soul is transformed into decay, 

and the human being settles into camp harness. 

DUring all the years of the camps, there were evidently quite 

a few escapes. Here 'are some statistics accidentally come by: In 

the month of March, 1930, alone, 1,328 persons escaped from 

imprisonment in the R.S.F.S.R. 1 (And how inaudible and soundless 

this was in our society.) 

With the enQrmous development. of the Archipelago after 1937, 

particularly during the war years, when battle-fit infantrymen 

were rounded up and sent to the front, it became even more dif" 

ficult to provide proper convoy, and not even the evil notion of 

self-guarding couId solve all the' problem of the chiefs. Simul- 

1. TsGAOR, collection 393. shelf 84. file 4. sheet 68. 

391

Changing One's Fate! I 393 

. taneously with that there was the hankering to get from the 

camps as much economic profit and production and labor as posd~lbis 

this compelled. particularly in logging operations. the 

dispatch of work parties and subparties on distant assignments 

and their extension into more remote areas--and the guard supposedly 

surrQJlIlding them became ever more illusory. ever more 

unrem. - 

By 1939, on some of the auxiliary expeditions of the Ust-Vym 

Camp, instead of a perimeter fence surrounding the camp there 

were only pole or wattle pmings and no nighttime illuminationin 

other words, at night no one kept the prisoners from departing! 

Even in the penalty camp in this camp complex, when the prisoners 

were taken: into the forests for work, there was only one 

armed guard for a brigade of prisoners. It is obvious that he had 

no way to. keep track of them. And seventy men- escaped from 

there during the summer of 1939. (One even escaped twice in 

one day: before lunch and after lunch!) However, sixty returned. 

And there was no news of the rest. 

But that was in the wilderness. In Moscow itself .three very 

easy escapes took place while I was there: from the camp sector 

at Kmuga Gates during the day, when a young thief climbed the 

fence of the work compound (and, with his thiefs tment for 

braggadocio, sent the camp a postcard the next day saying he 

was off to Sochi and sending his best wishes to the camp chief); 

from the Marfino minicampnear the Botanicm Gardens, the girl 

I have &ready writtep. about; and, from the same place, a young 

nonpoliticm offender jumped on a bus and went off to the center 

of town. True, he had been left entirely without any guard at all; 

ganged up on us, the MGB took a cav&ier attitude toward the 

loss of a nonpoliticm offender. 

In all likelihood they did some arithmetic in Gulag one bright 

day and became convinced that it was much cheaper to permit a 

certain percentage of zek losses than to establish a truly strict 

guard over all the many thousand points of imprisonment. 

And at the same time they relied on certain invisible chains 

which kept the"llatives reliably in their place. 

The strongest of these chains was the prisoners' universm submission 

and totm surrender to their situation as slaves. Almost 

to a man, both the 58's and the nonpoliticm offenders were hardworking 

family people capable of manifesting valor only in law- 


ful ways, on the orders of and the approval of themgher-ups. 

Even when they had been imprisoned for five and ten years they 

could not· imagine that singly"'---Or, God forbid, collectivelythey 

might rise up for their liberty since they saw arrayed against 

them the state (their own state), the NKVD" the police, the 

guards, and the police dogs.ABd e-yen if you were fortunate 

enough to escape unscathed, how could you live afterward on a 

false passport, with a false name, when documents were checked 

at every intersection, when suspicious eyes followed passers-by 

from behind every gateway? And the universal mood in the corrective-labor 

camps was: Why are you standing there with your 

rifles, what are you watching us. for? Even if you disperse, we'll 

make no move to go anywhere; we are not criminals, why should 

we escape? And we are going to be freed in a year anyway! 

(Amnesty ... ) K. StraJchovich relates that in 1942 his prisoner 

transport train was bombed while they were being taken to Uglich. 

The convoy scattered, and the zeks stayed right there, waiting 

for it to return. There are many such stories, like the story of 

the bookkeeper of the Ortaussky Division of Karlag: they sent 

him a distance of twenty-five miles with his financial report, 

accompanied by one convoy guard .. And on the way back he not 

only had to haul the dead-drunk convoy guard in a cart, but also 

to take particular care of his rifle so the poor fool wouldn't be 

tried for losing it. 

Another chain was the death factory--camp starvation. Although 

it was precisely this starvation that at times drove the 

despairing to wander through the taiga in the hope of finding 

more food than there was in camp, yet it was this starvation that 

also weakened them so that they had no strength for a long flight, 

and because of it it was impossible to save up a stock of food for 

the journey. 

And there was another chain too--the threat of a new term. 

A political prisoner was given a new tenner for an escape attempt 

under that same Article 58 (and gradually it proved best 

to give Article 58-14--Counter-Revolutionary Sabotage). The 

thieves, it's true, were given Article 82 (pure escape) and two 

years in all, but up to 1947 they got no more than two years for 

theft and also robbery, so these were of comparable magnitude. 

Furthermore, camp was their "native home." In camp they did 

not starve, they did not work-their smartest move was not to


escape but to serve out their term, all the more so because they 

might always benefit from special privileges or amnesties. Escape 

for a thief was merely the sport of a well-fed; healthy body and 

an explosion of impatient greed: to get out and go on a spree, to 

rob, drink, rape, show off. The oQiy serious escapes among them 

were by bandits and murderers with long terms. 

(The .thieves love to lie about their nonexistent escapes or 

wildly embroider the ones they did carry out. They will tell you 

. how India [the barracks of thieves] received the challenge banlier 

for the best preparations for winter-for the substantial 

amount of earth piled around the barracks wall-and they will 

claim they were digging a tunnel at the same time and taking the 

earth out right under the chiefs' eyes. Don't believe theml All 

"India" wouldn't escape, and they wouldn't want to dig very long 

because they needed easier and quicker ways; and the chiefs 

weren't so stupid as not to see where they were getting the earth 

from. The thief Korzinkin, with ten convictions on his r~ord, a 

commandant trusted by his chief, really did escape, well dressed, 

and really did pass himself off as an assistant prosecutor, but he 

had to add to that story how he spent the night in the same hut 

as the commissioner for catching escapees [they really did exist], 

stole.his uniform, his gun; and even his dog one night~and from 

then on passed himself off as the commissioner. He is lying 

through his teeth about all this. In their fantasies and S!ories the 

thieves always had to be more heroic than they really were.) 

Another thing restraining the zeks was not the compound but 

the privilege of going without convoy. The ones guarded the 

least, who enjoyed the small privilege of going to work and back 

without a bayonet at their backs, or once in a while dropping 

into the free settlement, highly prized their advantages. And after 

an escape these were taken away. . 

The geography of the Archipelago was also a solid obstacle to 

escape attempt&--those endless expanses of snow or sandy desert, 

tundra, taiga. The Kolyma, even though it was not an island, was 

more bitter than any island; it was a piece tom off from the rest 

and where could you escape to from the Kolyma? People undertook 

escapes from there only out of desperation. It is true that 

there was a time when the Yakuts were hospitable to the prisoners 

and undertook to help them: "Nine suns-and I will take you to 

Khabarovsk." They took them there, too, on their reindeer. But 


then escaped thieves·began to plunder the Yakuts and the Yakuts 

'changed toward the fugitives and started to turn them in. 

The hostility of the surrounding population, encouraged by the 

authorities, became the principal hindrance to escapes. The 

authorities were not stingy about rewarding the captors. (This 

was an additional form of political indoctrination.) And the 

nationalities inhabiting the areas around Gulag grlidually came 

to assume that the capture of a fugitive meant a holiday, enrichment, 

that it was like a good hunt or like finding a small gold nugget. 

The Tungus, the Komis, and the Kazakhs were paid off in 

flour and tea, and in densely settled areas the trans-Volga people 

living near the Burepolom and Unzha camps were paid for each 

captured fugitive at the rate of two poods--seventy-two pounds 

-of flour, eight yards of cloth, and several pounds of herring. 

During the war years there was no other way to get herring, and 

local inhabitants simply nicknamed the fugitives herrings. In the. 

village of Sherstka, for example, when any stranger appeared, the 

children would run along in B. group shouting: ''Mama! There's a 

herring coming!" 

And what about the geologists? ThosQ pioneers of the northern 

wastes, those brave, bearded, booted heroes, those lack London 

bold-hearts! A fugitive had little hope of help from our Soviet 

geologists, and it was better not to come near their bonfires. The 

Leningrl¢ engineer Abrosimov, arrested in the "Prompm:ty" 

wave and sentenced to a "tenner,'" escaped from the Nivagres 

Camp in 1933. He wandered about in the taiga for twenty-one 

days, and he was delighted to meet up with some geologists. But 

they took him off to . a settlement and handed him over to the 

chairman of the local trade union organization. (You c:an understand 

the geologists too: After all, they were not alone and they 

were afraid of being turned in by someone in their group. And 

what if the fugitive was really a criminal, a murderer-and would 

knife them in the night?) 

A captured fugitive, if he was dead when taken, right be' 

thrown near the camp mess hall to lie for several days with a rotting 

bullet wound-so the prisoners would value their thin gruel 

more highly. One taken alive right be set in front of the gate: 

house, and whenever a coluInn passed they would set the dogs on 

him. (And the dogs~depending on the command given, could 

suffocate a person, bite him; or merely tear his clothes .off, leav. 

ing him naked.) And one could also make a placard in the Cul-


tural and Educ~tional Section, saying: "I escaped, but the dogs 

caught me." And this placard could be hung around the fugitive's 

neck and he could be ordered to walk around the camp wearing it. 

And if he was beaten, then the! h~ to burst his kidneys. If his 

hands were screwed into handcuffS; then it ha(i to be done so that 

the feeling in his radial wrist joints would be'lost for good (G. 

Sorokfn. Ivdellag). Or ifbe was put into a punishment cell, he 

shouldn't come out without TB. (Nyroblag, Baranov,escape in 

1944. After being beaten by the convoy he coughed up blood, and 

three years later they had to remove his left lungS" 

Properly speaking, to beat the fugitive to within an inch of his 

life and to kill him ~ere the principal forms of combating escapes 

..in the Archipelago. 8 And even'if no escapes occurred-for a,long 

neht~ntit they sometimes had to be manufactuted. At the Debin 

goldfields in the Kolyma in 1951 a group of zeks was permitted to 

go out to gather berries. Three got lost-and di~peared. The 

camp chief, Senior Lieutenant Pyotr Lomaga, sent torturers. They 

loosed their dogs on the three sleeping men, then, smashed their 

skulls with the butts of their rifles until their heads were a mass of 

'pulp and their brains hung out-and in that state hauled them on 

a cart to the camp. Here the horse was replaced by four prisoners, 

who had to drag the cart past the whole line-up. ~'That's how it 

will be for everybody!" proclaimed Lomaga. 

And who can find inside hiJnself the desperation to keep from 

shuddering in the face of all that-and go on! and go onl and go ' 

onl--and ariv~but arrive where? There, at the end of the escape, 

when the'fugitive attained his destined and designated goal 

-who was there who wouldn't be afraid to meet him, to hide him, 

to look after_ him? It was only the thieves who were awaited out 

in freedom at a prearranged hangout. For us 58's such an apartment 

would be called -a conspiratorial address, and 1h:at was 

nearly an underground org~ation. 

That is how many obstacles and pitfalls there were -in the path 

of escape. , 

But the desperate heart sometimes did not weigh things. It 

2. And today he is naively seeking to have his illness recognized _ as an occupational 

illness, for the sake of his pension. -How could it be more occupational, 

one would think, for both prisoner and convoyl Yet they refuse to recognize 

it as 'such. 

.3. And it has become increasingly the principal form in tbe most recent, 

Khrushi:hevian, period as well. See Anatoly Marchenko'sMoi PoktWUliya 

(My Testimony).· 


saw: the river was flowing and a log was floating down it-and 

one jump! We'll float on down. Vyacheslav Bezrodny from the 

Olchan Camp, barely released from the hospital, still utterly 

weak, escaped down the Indigirka River on two . logs fastened 

. together-to the Arctic Oceanl Where was he going? And what 

was he hoping for? In file end he was not so much caught ,as 

picked up on the open sea and returned over the winter road to 

Olchan to that very same hospital. . 

It is not possible to say of everyone who didn't return to camp 

on his own, who was not brought in half alive, or who was not 

brought in dead, that he had escaped. Perhaps he had only exchanged 

an involuntary and long-drawn-out death in camp for 

the free death of a beast in the taiga. 

To the degree that -the fugitives didn't so much escape 'as . 

merely wander. around and return on their 'own-the camp security 

chiefs even derived benefits from them: without any strain 

they would wrap another term around them. And if no escapes 

took place for a long time, they arranged provocations: some 

stoolie or other was given instructions to set up an "escape 

group," and all of them would be arrested. 

But a man who seriously undertook to escape became very 

swiftly fearsome. Some of them set fire to the taiga behind them 

in order to get the dogs off their trail. And it would burn for 

weeks over dozens of miles. In 1949, on it meadow near the 

Veslyanka State Farm, a fugitive was detained with human flesh 

in his knapsack; he had killed an unconvoyed artist with a fiveyear 

term who had crossed his path, had cut his flesh off, and had 

not yet had the chance to cook it. 

In the spring of 1947 in the Kolyma, near Elgen, two convoy 

guards were leading a column of zeks. And suddenly one zek, 

without any prior agreement with anyone, skillfully attacked the 

convoy guards-on his own, disarmed them, and shot them both.· 

(His name is unknown, but he turned out to have been a recent 

front-line officer. A rare and bright 'example of a front-line' 

soldier who had not lost his courage in camp!) The bold fellow 

announced to the column that it was free! But the prisoners were 

overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his lead, and they all 

sat down· right there and waited for a new convoy. The front-line 

officer shamed them, but,.in vain. And then he took up the rifles 

(thirty-two c8rtrldges, "thirty-one for them!") and left alone. He


killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-second 

cartridge he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well 

have collapsed if all former front-liners had behaved as he did. 

In Kraslag a former soldier, a hero of Khalkhin-Gol, attacked 

a convoy guard with an ax, stunned him with the butt, took his 

rifle and thirty cartridges. The dogs were sent after him. He killed 

two of them and wounded the dog trainer. When they caught 

him, they didn't just shoot him but went crazy and avenged themselves 

and their dogs, riddling the corpse-with their bayonets and 

leaving it to lie that way for a week by the gatehouse. 

In 1951 in that same Kraslag, some ten long-termers were 

being convoyed by four infantrymen among the guards. Suddenly 

the zeks attacked the convoy, took away their automatic weapons, 

put on their uniforms- (but they had mercy on the soldiers-the 

oppressed were.often more magnanimous than the oppressors), 

and four of them, convoying with braggadocio, conducted their 

comrades to the narrow-gauge railroad. There was an empty car 

there, ready for timber. The false convoy went up to the locomotive 

and forced the crew to disembark. (One of them was a 

locomotive engineer.) They drove the train at full speed to the 

Reshoty Station on the trunk line of the Trans-SiberiaIi.. But they 

had about forty miles to cover. And meanwhile they had already 

been reported, starting with the guar¢; they'd spared. Sever~ 

times they had to -shoot their way past groups of -guards, and 

several miles before Reshoty the authorities succeeded in mining 

the track in front of them and put a battalion of camp guards . 

into position. All the fugitives perished in the unequal battIe. 

The quiet escapes were usually more fortunate in their results. 

Some of them were surprisingly successful. But we rarely hear of 

these happy stories; those who broke out do not give interviews; 

they have changed their names, and they are in hiding. Kuzikov 

Skachinsky, who escaped successfully in 1942, tells the .story 

now only because he was caught in 1959-after seventeen years. 4 

And we have learned of the successful escape of Zinaida 

4. Here is bow be was discovered: The man wbo bad fled with bim got 

caught in another case_ They managed to establisb bis true. identity by bis 

fingerprints. In this way they discovered that the fugitive bad not perisbed, as 

they bad formerly supposed. Tbey started to track down Kuzikov too. For 

this they conducted careful inquiries in bis bome region and put bis relatives 

under surveillance-and through a cbain of relatives they got to b:in. And 

they spared neither effort nor time for all of this at seventeen years' removel 


Y akovlevna Poval~ayeva because in the end it fell througIi. She 

got her term because she had stayed on as a teacher in her school 

durjng the German occupation. But she was not immediately arrested 

when the- Soviet armies arrived, and before her arrest she 

was married to a pilot. Then she was arrested and sent to Mine 

No.8 at Vorkuta. Through some Chinese working in the kitchen 

she established communication with freedom and with her husband. 

He was employed in civil aviation and ai:ranged a trip to 

. Vorkuta for himself. On an appointed day Zina went to the bath 

in the work zone, where she shed her camp clothing and released 

her hair, which had been curled the night before, from under her 

head ·scarf. Her husband was waiting for her in the work sector. 

There were security officers on- duty at the river ferry, but they 

paid no attention to a girl with curly hair- who was arm in arm 

with a flier. They flew out on a plane. Zina spent one year living 

on false papers. But she couldn't resist the desire to see her 

mother again-and her mother was under surveillance. At her 

new interrogation,he managed to convince them she had escaped 

in a coal car. And they never did find out about her husband's 

participation. 

In 1946 Janis L--s walked from his camp in Perm to 

Latvia, speaking fractured Russian the whole way and barely 

able to explain himself. His departure from camp was simple: he 

sprinted, brake through a rickety fence, and stepped over it. But 

later in a swampy·forest-with bast sandals on his feet-he had 

• to live for a long time on berries alone. One day he managed to 

take a village cow off into the woods and kill it. He ate his fill of 

beef and managed to make himself some primitive shoes from 

the cow's hide. In another place he stole a sheepskin coat from a 

peasant (a fugitive to whom the inhabitants are hostile unwillingly 

becomes the inhabitants' enemy). In populated places 

L--s claimed to be a Latvian conscript who had lost his 

documents. And although the universal inspection of passes had 

not yet been abolislied that year, in Leningrad~ which to him 

was a strange city, he managed without uttering a word to get 

to the Warsaw...Station and to walk another two and a hait miles 

along. the tracks and board a train there. (But there was one 

thing L--s was firmly assured of: when he got to Latvia he 

would be fearlessly hidden-and that,. of course, gave point to 

his escape.)


The kind of escape L--------s undertook required a peasant's 

dexterity, grasp, and energy. But what about a city dweller, yes, 

an old man at that, sentenced to five ye~ for repeating an anecdote, 

was he capable of escaping? It turns out that he was when 

a more certain death was the i,lnly outcome of staying in his own 

camp, a small 'camp, between Moscow and Gorky, for nonpolitical 

offenders on their last legs, which had been manufactUring 

shells since 1941. Well, five years was a "child's term," you might 

say, but the unfortunate anecdote teller would not have lasted 

out even five months if he was driven out to work without being 

fed. This escape was a gesture of despair, a brief impulse, for 

which there would have been neither the judgment nor the 

strength half a minute later. A routine train had been shunted 

into the camp and loaded with shells. And a, convoy sergeant 

came marching along it, followed by a railroadman who had fallen 

several cars behind; the sergeant opened the door of each red 

cattle caT and theckedto be sure no one was in there, then shut 

the door, and the railroadman put a seal on it. And our ill-starred 

famished last-Iegger of an anecdote teller,' behind the b8:ck of the 

sergeant, who had gone on past and in front of the railroadman, 

scrambled into a car. It was not easy for him to clamber up, ,an~ 

it was not easy,to push the door back noiselessly, and it was all 

very impractical~ it was a sure failure, and he closeii the door behind 

him, with his heart skipping a beat, he was already sorry he 

had started. The sergeant would return and would kick him with 

~ boots and any moment now the railroadman would shout. 

Already someone was touching the door-it was the railroadman 

putting ~n the seal! (And I myself think: maybe the good railroadman 

saw him-and pretended not to?) The train moved off, 

out of the compound. The train moved off to the front. This fugitive 

was unprepared. He didn't even have a piece of bread. In the 

course of three days he would almost certainly die in this moving 

voluntary-punishment cell. He wouldn't get to the front, and it 

wasn't the front he needed. What was he to do? How could he 

save himself now? He saw that the shell boxes were packed with, 

a steel band around them.. With his naked defenseless hands he 

tore that steel ribbon, and with it sawed through the floor of the 

S. All this bappeiled iD euc:tly this . way. but his Dame bas DOt been preserved. 


railroad car in a place where there weren't any boxes. This was 

impossible for an old man? But was it possible t6 die? And if 

they opened it and caught him-was that possible? F~ermore, 

the boxes had wire loops attached to them, to carry them by. He 

cut off the loops, and out of them he made similar but much 

larger loops and tied them so that they hung down through the 

crawl hole he had cut. How exhausted he was! How hard it was 

to get his tom hands to do what he wantCd them to! !low dearly 

that repeated anecdote was costing him! He didn't wait for a station, 

but carefully let himself down through the hole while the 

train was in illotion, and lay 'with both feet in one loop nel :r 

the re.ar of the train, and his shoulders' in another. The tr n 

moved on, and the fugitive' hung suspended there, rocking bl :k 

and forth. The speed slackened, and at that moment he decided :0 

let go; he dropped his feet, and his feet dragged along and dragg :d 

the rest of him down. This was a sure death act, a circus act-bl.t, 

after all, they might send a telegram after the train and search the 

cars. After all, they would have .missed him in the camp CODlpound 

by now. He could not straighten out. He could not raise 

his head. He clung to the ties. He closed his eyes, ready for death. 

The accelerated clicking of the last cars-then lovely silence. The 

fugitive opened his eyes and rolled over: all he could see was the 

red light of the departing train! Freedom! 

. But that was not yet salvation. Freedom was freedom, but he 

had neither documents nor money, he was dressed in camp rags, 

and he was doomed. Swollen and tom, somehow he managed to 

get to a station, and there mingled with a recently arrived Lenin~ 

grad train; evacuated semicorpses were being led by the hand and 

fed hot food at the station. But that would not have saved him 

either--except that in the train he found a dying friend and took 

his documents, and he knew all about his past too. They were all 

sent to a place near Saratov, and for several years, until the war 

was over, he lived there on a poultry farm. And then he was 

seized with a longing' to see his daughter and went off to find 

her. 

He looked for her in Nalchik, in Armavir, and he found her in 

Uzhgorod. During this time she Jiid ~aried a border guard. She' 

had believed her father happily dead and buried, and now she 

listened to his story with horror and revulsion. Although she was 

quite. devout in her civic conscientiousness. she nevertheless re-

Changing One's Fate! I. 403 

tained shameful vestiges of kinship and she did not denounce her 

father· but merely drove him from her door. There were no other 

relatives of the old man left. He lived a meaningless existence, 

wandering like a nomad from city to city. He became a dope addict. 

In Baku he smoked hashish and was picked up by an ambulance 

and while under the influence of the drug gave his right 

name, though when he came to, he gave the name under which he 

had been living. It was one of our Soviet hospitals, which certainly 

couldn't treat him without first establishing his identity. A cOttlrade 

was sUlJll!loned from State Security-and in 1952, ten 

years after his escape, the old man got twenty-five years. (It was 

this that gave him the happy chance to tell his own story in prison 

cells and thus to enter history.) 

Sometimes the subsequent life of a successful fugitive was more 

dramatic than the escape itself. That is how it must have been 

with Sergei Andreyevich Chebotaryov, who has already been 

mentioned more than once in this book. In 1914 he became an 

employee of the Chinese Eastern Railroad (the KVZhD). In 

February, 1917, he became a Bolshevik. In 1929, during ·the 

period of the KVZhD hostilities, he was imprisoned in a Chinese 

prison, and in 1931 he and· his wife, Yelena Prokofyevna, and 

his sons, Gennady and Viktor, returned to their homeland. The 

Fatherland then operated in its usual way: Within a few days he 

himself was arrested; his wife went insane; his soDs were turned 

over to different orphanages, and were given new patronymics 

and· surnames, even though they well remembered their own and 

. objected. At first Chebotaryov was given only three years by the 

Far Eastern·troika of the OGPU (another troika!)-because of 

their inexperience; but soon he was seized again, tortured, .and 

resentenced to ten -years without. the right of correspondence 

(what was there for·him to write about now?), and even confinement 

under intensified guard during the revolutionary holidays. 

The severity of this sentence unexpectedly helped him. In 1934 

he was moved to Karlag, where he worked on building a railroad 

to Mointy. While there, during the May holidays of 1936, he 

was confined in the penalty isolator, and they threw in with him 

the free employee Avtonom Vasilyevich Chupin under the same 

conditions as himself. Whether he was druIik or sober isn't clear, 

but at any rate Chebotaryov managed to filch. his three-month 

identification certificate, which had expired six months earlier 


and which had been issued by his village soviet. This certificate 

virtually obliged him to escape! And on May 8 Chebotaryov left 

the Mointy Camp, dressed in civilian clothes, without a scrap of 

camp clothing on himor with him, and with two half-liter bottles 

in his pockets like a typical drunk, except that they held not 

vodka but water. Ahead of him stretched the salt-marsh steppes. 

- Twice he fell into the hands of Kazakhs who were on their way 

to work on the railroad, but since he knew a little Kazakh, "I 

played on ·their religious feelings and they let me go.'" At the 

western edge of Lake Balkhash he was detained by a Security 

Operations post of Karlag. Taking his document, they asked him 

to give all sorts of information about himself and his relatives, 

and the supposed Chupin answered correctly from memory. Here 

again he had a lucky accident (without such lucky accidents 

people probably get caught). The head of the operations group 

came into the dugout, andChupin beat him to the draw:, "Hey! 

Nikolai, how are you? Don't you recognize me?" (This splitsecond 

calculation was based on facial wrinkles and' a contest 

in remembering faces: I r~ognize you all right, but if you rec~ 

ognize me, I'm a goner!) ''No, I don't recognize you." "Well, 

how about that! We were traveling on a train togetIier! Your 

name,is Naidyonov, and you were telling me how you met Olya 

at the station in Sverdlovsk-you met in a train compartment and 

after that you got married." It was all true. Naidyonov was' 

astenished; they had a smoke together and they let the fugitive go. 

(Ob, you bluecaps! Not for nothing do they teach you to keep 

silent! You must not give in to the human impulse to frankness. 

You told this story, not in a railroad car, but when you were on 

an assignment at the tree nursery of Karlag a year before, and 

you told it to the prisoners, just like that, o~t of foolishness, and 

you could never have remembered all the mugs of those who 

listened to the story. And in all likelihood he had told this story 

on a train too, more than onee---it was the kind of story to tell 

on trains. And Chebotaryov's bold play was based on that!) 

Joyfully Chupin went fartb,~ along the highwa~ to Chu Station, 

6. Religion can have its uses even for an atheist! I affirmed earlier that 

orthodox Communists did not make escape attemptS. Ch"botaryov was not 

one. But he was not entirely devoid of materialism either. I imagine that among 

the ~ 'the recollection of the Budenny repression of 1930 was still very 

much alive, because they were good to him. Things wouldn't be like that in 

1950. '


past the lake and .on south. For the most part he traveled at night, 

and hid in· the high reeds whenever· automobile headlights approached. 

During the day he lay down in them (there were reed 

jungles there). There were fewer and fewer operatioJiS men 

.t~oba At that time the Archipelago had' not yet cast its metastases 

into those areas. 7 He had bread and sugar with him and be made 

them last, and for five days he went along without any water at 

all. After 125 miles of walking he reachep the station and got 

on a train. 

' 

And then began his free-no, poisoned-years, because Che. • 

botaryov couldn't risk settling down or staying too long in one' 

place. That same year, several months later, he ran into his own 

camp godfather in the city park in Frunze! But that was in passing, 

it was a festive occasion with music and girls, ~d' the godfather 

failed to. recognize him. He had to leave the job he had 

found. (The senior bookkeeper questioned him and guessed the 

urgent reasons--but turned out to be a SoIovki veteran ltimseIf.) 

He bad to move on. At first be would not take the risk of seeking 

out his 'family, but afterward he worked out how to. He wrote 

to a woman cousin in Ufa: "Where are Lena and the cbildl'en? 

Guess 'who is writing you. Don't ~el her yet." And the return 

address was some kind of Zirabulak station, a man, named 

Chupin. And the cousin replied: "The children are lost and your 

wife is in Novosibirsk." Then Chebotaryov asked het to go to 

Novosibirsk to tell his wife-but only face· to face-that her 

husband had reappeared and wanted to send money. The cousin 

went-and now his own wife wrote-to him: she was in a psychiatric 

hospital; her passport had been lost; she had to get through 

three months of forced labor; and she couldn't receive' money 

sent general delivery. His heart leaped; he had to go to her! And 

her husband sent her an insane telegranl: ''Meet me'~n train 

such-and-such, car such-and-such." The heart is ever defenseless 

against emotion, but it is not, praise God, imniune to premonitions. 

These premonitions so played on his mind while he was 

en route that he got off the train two stations before Novosibirsk 

and hitched a ride in a passing automobile. Having checked his 

luggage at the baggage room, he went recklessly to his wife's 

7. But Boon afterward the Kor~n exiles were sellt there, and 'later the 

Germans, and then all the natic)ns. Seventeen years later I ended up there 

.~m ' 


addreSs. He knocked! The door was open and there was no one 

in the house. (This first coincidence was an ill omen: the landlord 

had spent the whole day on guard in order to warn him about 

the ambush waiting for him-but at that very -moment had 

gone out to get water!) He' went on in. His wife was not there. 

On a cot lay a Chekist covered with his coat and snoring loudly. 

(This second coincidence. was a benign omen!) Chebotaryov 

fled. At that moment. he was hailed by the landlord-a fellow 

acquaintance from the KVZhD, not yet arrested. Apparently his 

son-in-law was a Security man and had brought the telegram 

home hiIuself and shaken it in front of Chebotaryov's wif~ This 

rat of yours, he's runnjng right into our hands of his own accord! 

They had gone to the train-and hadn't found him; the second 

Security man had left for a moment and this other had lain down 

to rest. Nonetheless.Chebotaryov managed to get hold of his wife, 

and they went several stations down the line in a car and got on 

a train to Uzbekistan. In Leninabad they registered their marriage 

again! That is, without divorcing Chebotaryov she now married 

Chupin! But they could not make up their minds to live together. 

They sent inquiries in every direction in her name in an attempt 

to find the children-but in vain. And that was the sort of sep 

.arated _and tormented life they led before the war. In 1941 

Chupin was called up for military service and became a radio 

operator in the 61st Cavalry Division. On one occasion he was 

careless and called cigarettes and matches by their Chinese 

,~man as a joke. In wlu,lt normal country could something like 

that arouse suspicion-merely beca,use a man knew some foreign 

words? In our country it did. And the stoolies were right there. 

And Political Commissar Sokolov, Security officer of the 219th 

CllValry RegiInent, was-questioning him within the hour: "Where 

did you J~arn Chinese?" Chupin: "Only those two words." "Did 

you serve on. the KVZhD?" (Service abroad is immediately 

viewed as a grave sin!) The Security officer also set the stoolies 

on him, but they found nothing. So, just to be certain, he arrested 

him under 58-10 anyway: 

. • Because he did not believe the Sovinformbureau communiques 

• Because he had said that the Germans had more equipment 

(as if everyone had not seefi that with their own eyes)

Changing One's Fatel I 407 

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat! Court-martial! 

Death sentence. And Chebotaryov was so fed up with life in the 

Fatherland he didn't even petition for mercy. But the state needed 

working hands, so he got ten years plus five muzzled. Once again 

he was back in his "native home." He served (with time off for 

work) nine years. 

And there was yet another chance encounter. In camp another 

zek, N. F--v, called him over to a far comer of the upper 

bunks and there asked him quietly: "What's your name?" "Avtonom 

Vasilich." "And what province were you born in?" "Tyumen." 

"What district? What village soviet?" Chebotaryov-Chupin 

gave all the \correct answers and heard: "You're lying. I worked 

on the same locomotive as Avtonom Chupin for five years, I 

know him as well as I know myself. W~ it you who swiped his 

documents one day in May, 1936?" Now that's the kind of invisible 

underwater anchor a fugitive can rip open his belly on! 

What novelist would be believed if he were to think up an encounter 

like that? By that time Chebotaryov again wanted to survive 

and warmly shook that good man's hand when the latter said: 

"Don't be afraid, I won't go to the godfather. rm not a bastard!" 

And thus it was that Chebotaryov served out his second term, 

as Chupin. But to his misfortune his last camp was a top-secret 

one, one of that group of atomic projects-Moscow-l0, Tura-38, 

Sverdlovsk-39, and Chelyabinsk-40. They were engaged in separating. 

uranium-radium ores, and construction was proceeding 

according to Kurchatov's plans, and the construction chief was 

Lieutenant General Tkachenko, who was subordinate only to 

Stalin and Beria. Every quarter the zeks had to renew their 

pledges of "nondisclosure." But this was not the real trouble-the 

real trouble was that those released were not allowed to return 

home. The "released" prisoners were sent off in a large group 

in September, 1950--to the Kolyma! Only there were they relieved 

of convoy and declared to be a particularly dangerous 

special contingent! They were dangerous because they had helped 

Plake the atomic bomb! (How can one really keep up with all 

this and describe it? Chapters and chapters are necessary!) There 

were tenS of thousands of similar ones scattered all over the 

Kolyma!! (LOok through the Constitution! Look through the 

Codes! What do they. say about special contingents??) 


Well, at least he could send for his wife now! She came to hjm 

at the Maldyak goldfields. And from there they began to seek 

their sons again-but the replies were all negative: "No:" "Not. 

listed here." . 

Stalin kicked the bucket-and the old folks moved from !he 

Kolyma to ~e Caucasus-to warm their bones. Things eased up, 

though slowly. And in 1959 their son Viktor, a Kiev lathe operator, 

decided' to get rid of his hateful new name and declared 

himself to be the son of the enemy of the people Chebotaryov! 

And a year later his parents found him! And now the father's 

problem was to regain the name of Chebotaryov himself (thrice 

rehabilitated, by then he coulq no longer be charged for the 

escape). He came out into the open. His fingerprints -were sent 

to Moscow for comparison. The- old man got back his peace of 

mind only when all three of them were issued passports in the 

name of Chebotaryov; and his daughter-in-law also became Chebotaryov. 

(But a few years later he wrote to me that he already 

regretted having found Viktor; he abuses :bis father as a criminal 

and the source of all his misfortunes, and waves away the re- 

37. The Chebotaryov5 • 

/

Changing One's Ftite/ I 409 

habilitation certificates: "Afake!"8 And his elder son, Gennady,· 

never has been found.) (illustration No. 37: the Chebotaryov 

family.) 

From all the cases I have reported it is clear that even a sue: 

cessful escape still couldn'fbring freedom, but merely a life con.. 

stlintlyoppressed and threatened. :rhis was very well understood 

by some of the fugitives-by those who in the cainps had succeeded 

in breaking away from the Fatherland politically; by 

those, too, who lived by the ignorant illiterate principle of just 

living! And it was not altogether rare to find among the fugitives 

. some (in case of failure, they had their answer ready:' "We 

escaped in .order to go to the Central Committee and ask to have 

our cases reopened") whose purpose was escape to the West and 

who considered only that kind of escape complete. 

These escapes are the hardest of at! to talk about. Those who 

did not make it are in the damp earth. Those who were caught 

ni~ga are silent. Those who left in some cases surfaced in the 

West but in some cases, because of someone left behind, are still 

silent. There were rumors that in Chukotka some Zeks captured 

a plane and seven of them flew to Alaska. But what I think is: 

they merely tried to seize one and their plan failed. 

All these cases will continue to languish in secrecy for a long 

time to come, and grow old, and lose their relevance, just-like 

this manuscript, and like everything truthful written in our country. 

Here is one such case, and once again human memory has 

failed to preserve the name of the heroic fugitive. He was from 

Odessa, and in his civilian profession he was a mechanical engineer; 

and in the army a captain. He finished the war in Austria 

and served in the occupation forces in Vienna. He was arrested 

in 1948 on the. basis of a denunciation and was charged and 

sentenced under Article 58 to twenty-five years, as was the norm 

by then. He was sent off to Siben~ to a camp located 180 miles 

from Taishet, in other words far from the main line of the Trans 

Siberian. He very soon began to weaken .at logging. But he re- 

. tained the will to fight for life and his memory of Vienna. And 

from there-yes, from there-he succeeded in escaping to Vi~ 

enna! Incredible! 

8. And now the old man has fallen silent. I fear • • • he May have died. 


Their logging sector was bordered by a cut which was kept 

under surveillance from small watchtowers. On the chosen day he 

had a bread ration with him at work. He felled a thickly branched 

pine across the cut and beneath its branches crawled to its top. 

:It wasn't tall enough to span the entire cut, but, continuing to 

crawl, he made it across successfully. He took an ax with him. 

It was summer. He made his way through the taiga in windfallen 

woods. The walking was very difficult, but on the other hand, he 

didn't run into anyone for a whole. month. Tying ·up the sleeves 

and conar of his shirt. he caught fish in it and ate them raw. He 

collected cedar nuts, mushrooms, and berries. Half dead, he nonetheless 

managed to get to the Trans-Siberian tiunk line and happily 

went-to sleep in a haystack. H~was roused by voices: they 

were picking up the hay with pitchforks and had already found 

him. He was fagged out and prepared neither to run away nor to 

put up a fight. And he said: "Well, all right, take me. Turn me 

in; I am a fugitive." There stood a railroad track walker and his 

wife.·And the track walker said to him: "Oh, come on now, we 

are Russians. Just sit there and don't give yourself away." They 

went off. But the fugitive didn't believe them; they were, after 

all, Soviet people, they had to denounce him. And he crawled 

off into the woods. From the edge of the forest he watched and 

saw. the track walker return, bringing clothing and food. That 

evening the fugitive walked along the track and at a forest whistle 

stop boarded a freight train, jumping off before morning and 

going into the forest for the day. Night after night he moved on 

in this way, and when he grew stronger, he even got off at every 

stop, hiding in the foliage or walking on ahead, getting in. front 

of the train, and then jumping on it again while it was moving. 

That way he risked dozens of times losing an arm, a leg, his head. 

(That was how he paid for the few easy glides of the pen of the 

stoolie who had turned him in.) But on one occasion, just before 

reaching the Urals, he changed his rule and went to sleep .on a 

flatcar carrying logs. He was wakened bya kick and a lantern 

shining in his eyes and a demand for ''Documents!'' "Just a 

IIlinute!" He rose and with one blow knocked the guard off the 

car and jumped off the other side-and onto the head of another 

guard! He knocked that one off his feet and managed to make 

. his getaway under the nearby trains. Outside the station he 

bo;u:ded a train while it was moving. He decided to bypass


Sverdlovsk by walking around it, and in the suburbs plundered 

, a trade stall, got clothes for himself, put three suits on, and collected 

some food. At one station he sold one of the suits and 

bought a ticket from Chelyabinsk to Orsk and Central Asia .. 

No, he knew where he was going-to Vienna! But he had to 

cover his tracks and let the pursuit die down. A Turkmen, chairman 

of a collective farm, met him at the bazaar, took him to 

work on the farm even though he had no documents. And his 

hands justified his calling as a mechanical engineer. He repaired 

all the farm machinery. After several months he took his pay 

and went to Krasnovodsk, near the border. After the train left 

Mary, a patrol came along, checking 4ocuments. At this point, 

our mechanical engineer went out on the car platform, opened 

the door, hung onto the toilet window, where they could not see" 

him from inside because of the frosted glass, and only the toe 

of one shoe remained t9 support him and enable him to get 

back on. the step. The patrol faUed to notice the toe of a shoe 

in the comer of the door frame and went on into the next car. 

And so' the awful moment passed. Having crossed the Caspian 

Sea withc;>ut incident, the fugiti~e got on a train going ~m Baku 

to Shepetovka, and from there he made for the Carpathians. 

With great caution he started to make his way across the mountainQUS 

border at a remote, steep, forested place-but still the 

border guards caught him! How much had he had to sacrifice, 

to suffer, to invent, and to endure since his Siberian camp, since 

that first felled pine tree-and right. at the very end everything 

was wrecked in one instant! . • . And his strength left him, just 

as it had back there in the haystack at Tai~et, and he couldn't 

resist any longer, nor Ii!!, and in a final fury he merely shouted: 

"All right, take· me, you executioners! Take me, you are 

stronger!" ''Who are you?" "A fugitive! From the camps! Take 

me!" But the border guards acted rather strangely: They blindfolded 

him, took him into a dugout, and there unbound his eyes 

-and questioned him again-and suddenly it emerged that they 

were friends: Banderists, Ukrainian nationalist partisans! (Fie; 

fie! educated t:eaders will frown and wave their hanc\!! at me: 

''Well, :you certainly picked some character-he regarded the 

Banderists as friends! A real rotten fruit, that one!" Well, all I 

can do is spread my hands myself: That~s how he was. That's 

how he was when he escaped. That's what the camps had made 


of him. These camp people, as I can. tell you, live on the basis 

of the swinish principle "Existence determines consciousness." 

Not by what the newspapers say. To camp inmates, friends are 

those with whom they were tormented in camp. And enemies 

are those who put the dogs on their trail. Lack of conscientiousness!) 

And so they embraced! The Banderists still had their own 

border crossings at that time, and they gently led him across. 

And so there he was in Vienna again! But this time in the 

American zone. And submissive still to that enticing materialist 

principle, and not forgetting for one moment his bloOdy. death 

camp, he no longer sought work as a mechanical engineer but, 

instead, went to the American authorities to unburden his soul. 

And he began to work for them in some capacity. 

But! It is a human trait to relax one's vigilanCe as soon as the 

danger is past. He planned to send some money to his parents 

in Odessa, and to do that lie had to exchange dollars for Soviet 

money. Some Jewish businessman invited him to his apartment 

in the Soviet zone of Vienna to make' the deal. People used to 

shuttle back and forth all the time, paying no attention to the 

zones, but he should never have gone into the Soviet zone! He 

went, however-and was captured at the apartment of the 

money-changer. 

Now this is a very Russian story of how superhuman feats are 

strung on and on arid then thrown away for a glass of vodka. 

Sentenced to death and in a cell of the Soviet prison in Berlin, 

he told the whole story to another officer and engineer-Anikin. 

This Anikin had himself been both in a Geiman POW camp and 

on the verge of death in Buchenwald-and had been freed by 

the Americans, taken to' the Soviet zone of Germany, and left 

there temporarily to assist in dismantling factories, and had run 

off to West Germany, and was engaged in building a hydroelectric 

power station near Munich, when he was kidnaped by the Soviet 

intelligence service (he was blinded with headlights and pushed 

into an automobile). And what was it all for? So that he could 

hear the story of the Odessa mechanical engineer and preserve 

it for us! So as to attempt fruitlessly to escape from Ekibastuz 

twice (about which there will be more in Part V)? And then 

be killed in the penalty lime factory? 

Now that is predestination! nose are the twists of fate! And 

how can we then discern the meaning of one individual human 

life? . . . .

Changing One's Fatel I 413 

We have not yet descnDed the group escapes, and there were 

many of them too. They say that in 1956 a whole small camp 

escaped near Monchegorsk. 

Thi; history of all the escapes from the Archipelago would be 

a list too long-to be read, too long to be leafed through. And any 

one person who wrote a book solely about escapes, to spare-his 

. reader and himself, would be forced to omit hundreds of C(lSCS. 

Chapter 15 

• 

Punishments 

Among the many joyous renunciations brought us by the new 

world were the renunciation of exploitation, the renunciation 

of colonies, the renunciation of obligatory military service, the 

renunciation of secret diplomacy, secret assignments and transfers, 

the renunciation of secret p,?lice, the renunciation of "divine 

law," and many, many'other fairy-tale renunciations in addition. 

But not, to be sure, a renunciation of prisons. (They didn't break 

down the walls, but merely inserted a "new class content" inside 

).meh~ However, there was an unqualified renunciation of punishment 

blocks-that pitiless torture which could have been 

conceived only by the hate-filled Jlrinds of bourgeois prison 

keepers. The Corrective Labor Code of 1924 did allow, it is true, 

the isolation in a separate cell of especially troublesome prisoners, 

but it warned: This separate cell must in no wise resemble a 

punishment cell; it must be dry, well lit, and provided with the 

appurtenances for sleeping. 

At that point it must have seemed ridiculous not only to the 

prison keepers but to the prisoners themselves that for some 

reason or other there was n9 punishment cell, that it should have 

been banned. 

' 

The Corrective Labor Code of 1933, which "was in effect" 

(i.e., not in effect) until the beginning of the sixties, turned out 

to be even more humane: it forbade even isolation in a separate 

cell! 

But this was not because the times had become more complaisant 

but because other gradations of intracamp punishment 

414

Punishments I 415 

had by this time ~ mastered and adopted by following the 

path of experiment. In them it was not loneliness but the collective 

that drove you mad, and on top of that those"who were being 

punished had to bend their backs: . 

• Strict Regimen Companies ("RUR's"), which were subsequently 

replaced by 

.• Strict Regimen Barracks ("BUR's"), which were.Penaity 

Work Briptes, and 

• Strict Regimen Camp Compounds (''ZUR's''), penalty 

. compounds. . 

And sometime later and somehow unnoticed they added-not 

punisbment cells, oh, nol but- 

, 

• Penalty Isolators-"ShIzo's" 

For if you didn't intimidate the prisoner, if there was no further 

punisbment you could apply-how could he be cOmpelled to 

submit to the regimen? 

And where could you put the captured fugitives? 

Whlit was the ShIzo given for? For whatever they felt like: 

You didn't please your chief; you didn't say hello the way you 

should have; you didn't get up on time; you didn't go to bed 

on tjme; you were late for roll can; you took the wrong path; 

you were wrongly dressed; you smoked where it was fox:l>idden; 

y()u'kept extra things in your barracks-take a day, three, five. 

You failed, to fuIfill the work norm, you were caught with a broad 

-take five, ~even, .or ten. And for work shirkers there was ,even 

fifteen days. And even though, according. to the law (what law?), 

fifteen days was the m~mum in penalty cells (though according 

to the Corrective Labor Code of 1933 even that was impennissible!), 

this accordion could be stretched out to a whole year. 

In 193-2 in Dmitlag (this is something Averbakh wri~es .about' 

-black oD?4Jjte!) . they used to give one year of ShIzo for sel/ 

mutilatitm! AJ1,d if one bears in mind _ that they used to refuse 

_ treatment u.. ~h cases,' then this meant they used to put a ~ok, 

wounded J*SOn in a punishment cell to rot-for a whole yearl 

What was required of a ShIzo? It had to be: (a) cold; (b) 

damp; (c) da..rk; (d) for starvation. Therefore there was no heat. 


(Lipai: not even when the temperature outside was 22 degrees 

below zero F~nheit.) They did not replace missing glass panes 

in the winter. They allowed the walls to get damp. (Or else they 

put the penalty-block cellar in moist ground.) ,The windows were 

microscopic or else there were none at all (more usual). They 

fed a "Stalin" ration of ten and a half ounces a day and issued a 

"hot" meal, consisting of thin gruel, only on the third, sixth, and 

ninth days of your impriSonment there. But at Vorkuta-Vom 

they gave only seven ounc~ of bread, and a piece.of raw fish in 

place of a hot dish on the third day. This is the framework in 

. which one has to imagine all the penalty cells. 

It is very naive to think that a penalty cell has .of necessity to 

be like a cell-with a" roof, door, and lock. Not at all! At 

Kuranakh-Sala, at a temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, 

the punishmeilt cell was a sodden frame of logs. (The free physician 

Andreyev said: "I, as a physician, declare it possible to put 

a prisoner in that kind of punishment cell.") Let us leap the entire 

Archipelago: at that same Vorkuta-Vom in 1937, the punishment 

cell for work shirkers was a log frame without a roof. And in 

addition there was a plain hole in the ground. Arnold Rappoport 

lived in a hole like that (to get shelter from the"rain they uSed to 

pull some kind of rag over themselves), like Diogenes in a barrel. 

Here is how they were fed: The jailer came out of the gatehouse 

hut with the bread rations and called to the men inside the log 

frame: "Come out and get your rations!" But no sooner did they 

stick their heads out of the log frame than the guard on the watchtower 

aimed. his rifle: "Stop. I'll shoot!" And the jailer acted 

astonished: "What, you don't want your bread? Well, then, I'll 

leave." And he simply hurled the br* and fish down into the pit 

in the rain-soaked clay. 

In the Mariinsk Camp (as in many others, of course) there 

was snow on the walls of the punishment cell--;:'"and in such-andsuch 

a punishment cell the prisoners were not allowed to keep 

their camp clotlies on but were forced to undress to their underwear. 

Every half-hour the jailer would let down the food shelf 

in the door and advise I. V. Shved: "Hey, you won't last, you'll 

die! You would do better to go out loggingl" And Shved decided 

he was right, that he would have the sheet pulled over his face 

more quickly if he stayed! He went out into the woods. Out of 

twelve and a half years·in the camps Shved spent a total of 148

Punishments I.. 417 

days in punishment cells. He had been punished for everything 

one could imagine! For refusing to be an orderly in India (the 

hoodlums' barracks) lie got six months in a penalty camp. For 

refusing t9 allow himself to be transferred from a well-fed agricultural 

work party to logging-he was sentenced a secoDd time 

for economic counterreVolution, 58-14, and got another ten 

years. Any thief not ·wanting to go to a penalty camp. could strike 

the convoy chief, knock his revolver out of his hands,. and he . 

would be sent nowhere. The peaceful political prisoner, however, 

had no way out-he would have his head forced down between 

his legs. In the Kolyma in 1938 the punishment cells for the 

thieves were heated, unlike those for the 58's. 

The "BUR's"-the Strict Regimen Ban'Ilcks-were intended 

for longer imprisonments. Prisoners were kept there for a month 

or three months, for a half-year or a year; or without any limit 

to their term, simply because they were considered dangerous, 

Once Y9U got yourself on the black list you would be pushed iDto 

the BUR at the first opportunity-every May Day and every 

November holiday, whenever there was an escape or any other 

~sunu camp happening. 

The BUR could be the most ordinary kind of b8rracks, set 

apart and fenced off by barbed wire, with the prisoners in it 

being taken out daily to the hardest and most unpleasant work in 

eht~ camp. It could also be a masonry prison inside the camp 

with a full prison system-with beatings of prisoners summoned 

one by one to the jailers' quarters (a favorite method that didn't 

leave marks was to beat with a felt boot with a brick inside it); 

with bolts, bars, locks, and peepholes on every door; with cOncrete 

floors to the cells and an additional separate punishment 

cell for BUR inmates. 

This was exactly what the Ekibastuz BUR was like (although 

they had the first type there as .weQ). The prisoners confined in 

it were kept in cells without sleeping shelves. (They slept on the 

floor on padded jackets and pea jackets.) A "muzzle" made of 

sheet iron completely covered the tiny little window below the 

ceiling. There were nail holes in it, but in the winter the snow 

co:vered even these, and it became totally dark in the cell. The 

electric light was not turned on during the day, which meant that 

day was darker than night. There was never any ventilation of 


- 

the cell. For half a year-in 1950--the prisoners were not taken 

on even one fresh-air walk,. And so this BUR was very like Ii 

fierce prison, and it was hard to see what it had to do with a 

camp. The prisoners had to urinate inside their' cell instead of 

being taken out to a toilet. The hauljng out of the big latrine 

barrel was considered a privilege by the cell orderlies because it 

meant a chance to gulp down some fresh air. And a b~th ... 

was a holiday for everyone. The cell was tightly packed. There 

was room only to lie down but not to stretch YQur legs. And this 

-for half a year. The gruel was water, there were twenty-one 

ounces of bread and not a crumb of tobacco. If anyone got a 

parcel from home while.he was in the BUR, anything in it which 

would spoil was ''written off" (the administration grabbed it off 

or else sold it cheap to the trusties). And the rest was put into the 

storage room to be kept for many, many' months. (Whenever such 

special-regimen prisoners were taken out to work again, they 

would get a move on to avoid being locked up again.) 

i Sometimes in this sufocatio~ and immobility the prisoners 

just couldn't stand it any longer-particularly those being assimilated 

to the thieves' law who were nervous and self-assertive. 

(Thieves who got into Ekibastuz were also considered 58's and 

had no special privileges.) The most popular dodge of the BUR 

prisoners was to swallow the aluminum tablespoon provided for 

lunch. Everyone who did this was, X-rayed. And only when 

it had been determined tbat he was not lying, that he really had 

a spoon inside him, did they put him in'the hospital and cut open 

his stomach. Lyoshka Karnoukhy repeated this spoon-swallowing 

caper three times and there was nothing left of his stomach~ 

Kolka Salop'ayev played insane: he hanged himself one night, 

but the other lads there "saw" him by agreement, tore down the 

noose, and he was taken to the hospital. sOmeone else contaminated 

a thread by pulling it between his teeth and then inserted 

it with a needle under the skin on his leg. Infection! Hospital! 

He didn't care whether it was gangrene or not-anything to get 

out of there. 

But the convenience of also getting some work out of the 

punished prisoners compelled the bosses to set them apart in 

individual penalty compouncls--the "ZUR's." In the "ZUR's," ;,.. 

'the first place, the food was worse. For months at ,a time

_._--------- 


might be no second course, and the bread ration was reduced. 

In the bath even in winter there was a broken window, and the 

women barbers in their padded cotton trousers and padded 

jackets used to crop the naked prisoners. There might be no mess 

hall, but they didn't hand out the gruel in the barracks eitheryou 

had to go to the kitchen to get it and carry it to the barracks 

through the frost and eat it there cold. The prisoners died in 

droves, and the clinic was filled with the dying. 

The mere enumeration of penalty compounds will someday' 

constitute an historical investigation of its own, the more so 

because it will not be easy to carry out. Everything is being 

erased. 

Here is the kind of work they'akigned the penalty compounds: 

harvesting hay twenty miles away from the camp compound, 

where the prisoners would be quartered in shackS made of hay 

and had to scythe in swamps with their feet always in water. 

(When they had friendly guards, they could gather berries while 

they were at work; vigilant guards would shoot to kill, but they 

picked berries anyway. They so wanted to eat!) Or laying up 

silage in the same swampy places amid clouds of mosquitoes and 

without any protection from them. (Your face and neck were , 

eaten up, covered with scabs, and your eyelids were swollen--i 

a man almost went blind.) Or they might be sent to dig peat in 

the basin of the Vychegda River; in the winter, they had to open 

up the frozen strata of silt with a heavy sledge hammer and 

remove them, take·the partly thawed peat from beneath them, and 

then haul it half a mile uphill on sledges, dQing the pulling themselves. 

(The camp used to look afteritsborses.) Or they might 

be sent to work at ordinary earth-moving-in the "earth-moving 

camp" near Vorkuta, for instance. And then, too, there was the 

favorite penalty work~the lime quarry and the calC;ining of lime. 

And the stone quarries. There is no room to list everything. All 

the heaviest of the heavy jobs, all the most unbearable of the 

unbearable jobs-that was penalty labor. And every camp had, 

its own. . 

The favored candidates for the penalty compounds were: 

religious believers, stubborn prisoners, and thieves .. (Yes, thieves! 

Here the great system of indoctrination broke down because of 

. the inconsistency of the local instructors.) They kept whole bar 

. racks of "nuns" there who had refused to work for the devil. (At 

420 I THE GULAG A·RCHIPEI;AGO 

the penalty camp for prisoners Under convoy at the Pechora State 

Farm they held them in a penalty block up to their knees in water. 

In' the autumn of 1941 they gave them all 58-14-economic 

counterrevolution-and shot them.) They sent the priest Father 

Viktor Shipovalnikov there on charges of conducting ''religious 

propaganda" (he had celebrated vespers-for five nurses on Easter 

Eve). They sent impudent engineers and other brazen intellectuals 

there. They sent fugitives who had been caught •. And also, 

with sad hearts, they sent socially friendly elements who simply 

refused to assimilate the proletarian ideolOgy. (Because of the 

complex mental task of classification, we will not reproach the 

administration for its sometimes unwitting confusion: From 

Karabas, for example, they sent two cartloads of ·religious women 

to the children's colony to look after . the camp childrenth~, 

and at the same time sent some women thieves and syphilitics to 

the Dolinka penalty sector, Konspai. But they got muddled over 

whose things to put on which cart, and the syphilitic women 

thieveS were sent to look after the children and the "nuns" to 

the penalty sector. They later realized what had happened, but 

left thein where they were.) 

And often prisoners were sent to penalty compounds for refusal 

to become informers; The majority died there and naturally cannot 

speak about themselves. And the murderm; from State Security 

are even less likely to speak of them. The soil scientist 

Grigbryev was' sent to a penalty zone .lor that, but he sUrvived. 

Also the editor of the Estonian agricultural magazine, Eln).ar 

Nugis. . 

There were stories ot women in this context too. It is impossible 

to reach a sufficiently balanced judgment on these stories 

because some intimate element always remains -hidden from us. 

HoweVer, here is the story of Irena Nagel as she told it herself. 

She worked as a typist for the Administrative Section of the 

Ukhta State Farm, in other words as a very comfortably established 

trusty. Heavy-set and imposing, she wore her hair in long 

braids wrapped around her head; and partly for convenience she 

went around in wide Oriental-type trousers and a jacket cut like 

a ski jacket. Whoever knows camp life will understand what an 

enticement this was. A security officer, Junior Lieutenant Siderenko, 

expressed a desire to get more intimately acquainted. And 

Nagel replied: "I would rather be kissed by the lowliest 'thief in

, Punishments I 421 

camp! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I can hear your 

baby crying in the next room." Repulsed by her outburst; the 

security officer suddenly changed his expression and said: "Surely 

you don't really think I like you? I merely wanted to put you to 

the test. So here's the way it is: you must collaborate with us." 

She refused and was sent to a penalty camp. 

Here are Nagel's impressions of the first night she spent there. 

In the women's barracks there were "nuns" and women thieves. 1 

Five girls were walking-about wrapped in sheets. Playing cards 

the day before, the women thieves had gambled and lost the 

girls' clothes and so had ordered them to take them off and turn 

them over. Suddenly a band of men thieves came in with a guitar 

-in underpants and felt hats. They sang their thieves' songs like 

some sort of serenade. All at once some other men thieves ran 

in in a rage, grabbed one of their own wenches, threw her on. the 

floor, beat her with a bench, and trampled her. She screamed, but 

then couldn't scream any more and stopped. No one interfered 

and.everyone just sat there and acted as if they didn't notice what 

was going on. Later the medical assistant came in. "Who beat you 

up?" "I fell off the bunk," answered the beaten-up girl.- At cards 

that same evening they also "lost" Nagel, but she was saved by 

the bitch Vaska the Crooked: he squealed to the chief and the 

chief took Nagel to spend the night at the gatehouse. 

The penalty work parties (like Parma Nyroblag, in the depths 

of the taiga) were also often regarded as penalty assignments 

both for enlisted men in the guards and for officers, and offenders 

were also sent.there; even more often, however, they substituted 

trusty guards. 

If there was no law and no justice in the ordinary camps, then 

all the more don't look for them in the penalty camps. The thieves 

played their dirty tricks just as they pleased and went around 

openly with knives. (The Vorkuta "Earth-Moving" Camp, in 

1946.) And the jailers .hid from the thieves outside the camp 

compound, and this was at a time when the 58's still constituted 

a majoritY. 

At the penalty camp of Dzhantui near Pechora the thieves 

burned down two barracks out of mischief, stopped the cooking, 

1. Who else in all world history ever equated them? What kind of person 

do you have to be to mix them together? 

422 I THE GULAG ARCHIP ELAGO 

drove away the cooks, and cut the throats of two officers. The 

remaining officers there, even under threat of being demoted to 

the ranks, refused to enter the camp compound. 

In cases like this, the chiefs saved themselves by resorting to 

the maxim "Divide and conquer"; they appointed as commandant 

of Dzhantui a bitch urgently brought in with his assistants from 

s.omewhere else. The very first night he and his gang knifed three 

thieves and things began to quiet down a little. 

It takes a thief to catch a thief, as the proverb had long since 

foreseen. The fathers of the Archipelago, having, in accordance 

with the Progressive Doctrine, multiplied these socially friendly 

elements beyond all rhyme -and reason, to the point where they 

themselves were being choked, could find no other way out of the 

situation than to split them up and sic them on each other in knife 

batt,les. (The war between the thieves and the bitches which shook 

the Archipelago in the po§twar years.) 

Of course, despite all ~heir apparent bravado, the thieves themselves 

also had a hard time in penalty situations. This kind of 

debauchery was their way of trying to break out somehow. As 

with all parasites, it was more advantageous for them to live 

among those they could suck on. Sometimes the thieves cut off 

their fingers so as not to have to go on penalty work, as, for 

example, at the celebrated Vorkuta Lime Factory. (Certain 

recidivists in the postwar period actually had inscribed in their 

sentence: "To be confined at the Vorkuta Lime Factory." The 

screws were being turned from on high.) 

There everyone went around with knives. The bitches and 

the thieves cut each other up every day. The cook-a bitchserved 

as he pleased: some got it thick, some got it thm, and 

some merely got a whack on the head with the ladle. The work 

assigner went about with an iron reinforcing rod and killed men 

on the spot with one single, whistling. blow . The bitches.. kept 

young boys for pederasty. There were three barracks: the barracks 

of the bitches, the barracks of the thieves; and the barracks 

of the "suckers," a hundred in each. The suckers ... worked: 

down below, near the camp, was a limestone quarry where lime 

was extracted; then it was carried in hand barrows up a cliff, 

where it was poured into cones, leaving flues on the inside; the 

lime was roasted; they then had to spread out the burning lime 

amid smoke, soot, and lime powder.


In the Dzhid!l camps, the penalty sector of Bayangol was 

famous. 

To Revuchi, the penalty camp of Kraslag, even before it had 

any penalty prisoners, they had sent a "working nucleus" of 150 

strong sloggers who had not committed any infractions. It's all 

very well to talk about penalty labor, but the chiefs have to fulfill 

their plan regardless! So they simply condemned ordinary sloggers 

to the penalty camp! They even sent thieves and also long-termers 

under Section 58-heavyweights. And the thieves were scared 

of. these heavyweights too, becausetIiey had twenty-five-year 

sentences, and in the postwar situation they could kill a· thief 

without having their prison term extended, lind it was no longer 

considered (as at the canals) a sally of the class enemy. 

The working day at Revuchi was supposed to be eleven hours, 

but in fact, what with marc~g for three or four miles to the 

forest and back, it t~ed out to be fifteen hours altogether. 

Reveille was at 4:30 A.M., and they got back to the camp compound 

toward 8 P.M. The zeks quickly began to become lostleggers, 

and, as a result, there were work shirkers. Following the 

general line-up in the morning they lined these malingerers up 

in-the club, and the work assigner went down the line and picked 

out some for a workover. These malingerers in rope sandals 

("shod for the season," 76 !iegrees below zero Fahrenheit) and 

thin pea jackets were pushed outside the compound--and five 

police dogs were set on them\ there with orders to "Get 'eml" The 

dogs tore them, clawed them) and knocked them down. The dogs 

were then called off and a Chinese came up on a young bull 

harnessed to a honey wagon, IQaded the malingerers into it, carried 

them off, and dumped the cart from the roadbed into a 

hollow below. Down there waiting was the brigadier Lyosha 

Sloboda, who beat the: malingerers with a club until ~ey got up 

and began to work fOr him. He credited their output to his own 

brigade, while they got only ten and ~ a half ounces each-a 

penalty-block ration. (Whoever thought up that whole graduated 

system was a real little Stalin!) 

Galina Iosifovna Serebryakova! Why don't you write about 

that? Why is it that your heroes. sitting there in camp, do nothing, 

work nowhere, and only talk about Lenin and Stalin? 

It was virtually impossible for an ordinary slogger from the 

58's to survive in such a penalty camp. 

424 I THE GULAG AllCHI}>BLAGO 

At the penalty work subpa#y of SevZhelDorlag (cbief-Colonel 

Klyuchkin) there was cannibaliSm in 1946-1947: peoplewere 

cut up into meat, cooked, and eaten. . 

This was on the heels of our people's earth-shaking, historic 

victory. . 

Ali, . Colonel Klyuchkinl Where did you build yourself your 

retirement villa?

- 426 I THE GULAG Al~HIPELAGO 

, Chapter 16 

• 

The Socially Friendly 

Let my feeble pen, too, join in praise of this tribe! They have 

been halled as pirates, as freebooters, as tramps, as escaped 

convicts .. They have been lauded as noble brigands-from Robin 

Hood on down to opere~a heroes., And we have been assured 

that they have sensitive hearts, that they plunder the rich end 

share with the poor. Oh, exalted confreres of Karl Moor! Oh, 

rebellious, romantic Chelkash! Oh, Beny. Krik! Oh, barefoot 

Odessa lads and Odessa troubadours! 

And, indeed, has not all world literature glorified the thieves? 

it is not for us to reproach Fran~ois ViIIon; but neither Hugo nor 

Balzac could avoid that path; and Pushkin, too, praised the 

thief principle in his Gypsies. (And what about Byron?) But 

never have they been so widely glorified and with such unanimity 

and so consistently as in Soviet literature. (For this there were 

lofty Theoretical Foundations, jt wasn't only a matter of Gorky 

and Makarenko.) Leonid Utyosov howled nasally from the 

variety. stage-and his delighted fans howled back in response. 

And it was in speech heavily influenced by the thieves' jargon 

that the Baltic and Black Sea "little brothers" of Vishnevsky and 

Pogodin spoke. And it was precisely this thieves' jargon that gave 

most of the expressiveness to their humor. Who was there who 

was not breathless with sacred emotion in describing the thieves 

to us-their vivid, unreined nihilism' at the beginning, and their 

dialectical "reforging" at the end-starting with Mayakovsky 

(and. in his footsteps, Shostakovich with his ballet The Young 

Lady and· the Hooligar.') and including ~nov. Selvinsky, 

42S 

Inber-and you could go on and on? The cult of the thieves 

proved to be infectious in an epoch in which literature was drying 

up for lack of positive heroes. Even a writer so far from the 

official Party line as Viktor Nekrasov could find no better model 

to exemplify Russian heroism than the thief Master Sergeant 

Chumak (In the Trenches 0/ Stalingrad). Even Tatyana Yesenina 

-(Zhenya, the Miracle 0/ the 20th Century) gave in to that same 

kind of hypnosis and drew for us the "innocent" figure of Venka, 

Jack of Diamonds. Perhaps it \V- only Tendryakov, with his 

capacity for looking at the wori41Vith an unprej!1diced eye, who 

first expressed for us without licking his chops the essence of the 

thief, shoWing his spiritual loathsomeness-in Three, Seven, Ace. 

Aldan-Semyonov is supposed to have been in camp himself, but in 

his "Bas-Relief on the Clift" he has invented absolute nonsense: 

He has a thief, Sasha Aleksandrov, influenced by the Communist 

Petrakov, whom all the bandits allegedly respect because he knew 

Lenin and helped destroy Kolchak (a totally fictitious motivation 

dating from Averbakh's 1ime) , who is supposed to have assembled 

a work brigade from thelast-leggers without living off them! (But 

they did live off them! As Aldan-Semyonov knows very well!) 

And this thief even made sure they were properly fed! And for 

this he even won from the free employees at cards! As if he didn't 

really need those winnings for the money to buy enough tea for 

a trip_ And what a stupid mothballed anecdote for the siXties! ~ 

Once in 1946 on a summer evening in the Ininicamp at the 

Kaluga Gates in Moscow, a thief lay stomach-down on the 

Windowsill of the third floor and in a loud voice began to sing one 

thieves' song after another. His songs carried easily over the 

gatehouse and barbed wire and could be heard out on the -sidewalks 

of Bolshaya Kaluga Street, at the trolleybus stop there, and 

also in the nearby section of Neskuchny Park. These songs 

glorified the "easy life"-of murder, burglary, assault. And not 

only did none of -the jailers, instructors, or guards on watch 

interfere with him, but it didn't even occur to anyone to shout at 

him. This propaganda of the thieves' views, it seemed, in no way 

contradicted the structure of our lives or threatened it. I sat there 

in the compound and thought: What would happen if at this 

moment I were to climb up to the third floor and from the same 

window in as loud a voice saPg something about the fate of the 

Russian POW, such as "Where Are You, Where Are You?," a

The Socially Friendly I 427 

song I had heard in counterintelligence headquarters at the front'! 

Or what if. I myself had composed something on the fate of the 

d~ailimuh and trampled front-line soldier? What an uproar there 

would have _been! How fast they would have come running! And 

right in all that hustle and bustle they would have run up the 

fire ladder to get me, not waiting until- I was surrounded. They 

would have gagged me, tied my hands, and pasted a second term 

on me! Yet the thief went right on singing, and the free 

Muscovites listened-as if that were the most ordinary thing 

in the world. 

Now, historically, as they never tire of saying in our country, 

this didn't happen all at once. In Old Russia there existed (just 

as there still exists in the West) an incorrect view of thieves 

as incorrigible, permanent criminals (a "nucleus-Ofcriminality"). 

Because of this the politicals were segregated -from them on 

prisoner transports and in prisons. And also because of this the 

administration, as P. Yakubovich testifies, broke their licentiousness 

and their supremacy in the prisoners' world by forbidding 

them to occupy positions in the artels, income-producing positions, 

and by decisively taking the side of the other hard-labOr 

prisoners. "Sakhalin swallowed them up by the thousands and 

never let them go." In Old Russia. there was just one single 

formula to be applied to the criminal recidivists: ''Make them 

bow their heads bl:Ileath the iron yoke of the lawl~ (Urusa".) 

And so it was that up to 1914 the thieves did not play the boss 

either in Russia as a whole or in Russian prisons~ . 

But the shackles fell and freedom dawned. In the desertion 

of millions in 1917, and then in the Civil War, all human passions 

were largely unleashed, and those of the thieves most of all. 

and they no longer wished to bow their heads beneath the yoke; 

moreover, they were informed that they didn't have to. It was 

found both useful and amusing that they were enemies of private 

property and therefore a revolutionary force which had to be 

guided into the mainstream of the proletariat, yes, and this 

would constitute n.,o special difficulty. An unprecedented multitude 

of newcomers also grew up to join them, consisting of the orphans 

of the Civil War and famine-homeless waifs or "besprizornild,"* 

and hoodlums. They warmed themselv~ at asp~alt caldrons 

durjng the New Economic Policy, and for their first lessons they 

~l to cut ladies' purses off their arms and lift suitcases 

428 I THE GULAGARCHIPELAGO 

through train windows with hooks. Reasoning on a social basis: 

wasn't the environment .to blame for everything? So let us reeducate 

these healthy lumpenproletarians and introduce them 

into the system of conscious life! And the first cOJlU!l.unes came 

into existence for this purpose, and the first children's colonies, 

and the motion picture The Road to Life. * (But what they didn't 

notice was that the "bespriiorniki" were not full-blown thieves. 

And the reforming of the "bespri~rniki"did not say anything: 

they had not yet had time to be totally spoiled.) 

And now, when more than forty years have gone by, one can 

look around and begin to have doubts: Who re-educated whom? 

Did the Chekists re-educate the thieves, or the thi(lVes the 

Chekists? The urka-the habitual thief-who adopted the 

Chekist faith became a bitch, and his fellow thieves would cut 

his throat The Chekist who acquired the psychology of the 

thief was an energetic interrogator of the thirties and forties, or 

else a resolute camp chief-such men were appreciated. They 

got the service promotions. . 

And the psychology of the urki was exceedingly simple and 

very easy to acquire: 

1. I want to live and enjoy myself; and f--. the rest! 

• 2. Whoever is the strongest is right! 

3. If they aren't [beat]ing you, then don't . lie down and 

ask ,for it. * (In other words: As long as they're beating up 

someone else, don't stick up for the ones being beaten .. Wait 

your own turn.} 

Beat up your submissive enemies one at a time!· Somehow this is 

a very familiar law. It is what Hitler did. It is what Stalin did. 

How much Sheinin.has lisped into our'ears about the "unique 

code" of the thieves, about the "honor" of their word. You read 

him and, they all tum into Don Quixotes and patriots! But just 

wait till you meet those ugly mugs in a cell or'a Black Maria .... 

Come on now, stop lying, you mercenary pens! You who have 

observed the Russian thieves through a steamship rail or across 

an interrogator's desk! You. who have never encountered the 

thieves when you were defenseless. 

The -thieves-the urki-are not Robin Hoods! When they 

want, they steal from last-Ieggers! When they want they are not

The Socially Friendly I ·429 

squet\1nish about-taking the last footcloths off a man freezing 

to death. Their great slogan is: "You today, me tomorrow!" 

But perhaps they really are patriots? Why don't they steal from 

the state? Why don't they plunder the special country villas? Why 

don't they stop the long black limousines? Is it because they expect 

to encounter. the conqueror of Kolchak there? No; it is 

because those automobiles and dach~ are well defended. And 

because stores and warehouSes are shielded by the law. Because 

the realist Stalin undqstood long ago that all this was just a big 

buzz.-this re-education of the urki. And he redirected their 

energy, sicked them on the citizens of. his own country. . 

Here is what our laws were ~e for thirty .years-to 1947: 

For robbery of the state, embezzlement of state funds, a packing 

case from a warehouse, for three potatoes from a collective farm 

-ten yearsl (After 1947 it was as much as twenty!) But robbery 

of a free person? Suppose they cleaned out an apartment, carting 

off on a truck everything the family had acquired in a lifetime. 

If it was not accompanied by murder, then the sentence was up 

to one year, sometimes six months. 

The·thieves flourished because they were encouraged. 

Through its laws the Stalinist power said to the thieven:learly: 

Do not steal from me! Steal from private persons! You see, 

private property is a belch from the past. (But "personally assigned" 

VIP property is the hope of the future. . . .) 

And the thieves. . . understood. In their intrepid stories an~ 

songs, did they go to steal where it was difficult, dangerous, 

where they could lose their heads? No. Greedy cowards, they 

pushed their way in where they were encouraged to push their 

way in-they stripped the clothes from solitary passers-by and 

stole from unguarded apar:tments. 

The twenties, the thirties, the fortieS, .the fifties! Who does not 

remember that eternal threat hovering over the citizen: Don't 

go where it's dark!. Don't come home late! Don't wear your. 

watch! Don'f carry money with youl Don't leave the apartment 

empty! Locks! Shutters! Dogs! (And nowadays those writers of 

satirical columns who weren't cleaned out at the time .ridicule 

these loyal watchdogs. . ' .. ) 1 

1. In the consistent struggle against the individuality of a man, first they 

deprived him of one friend-the horse, promising Ii trjlctor in its place. As 

if a horse were only draft power for a plow, and DOt, instead, your living 


How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police 

, didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a 

case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed 

cases-why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be 

given only siX months, and then be given three months off for 

good behavior? And anyway, it wasn't certain that the bandits 

would even be tried when caught. After all, prosecutors 2 

"lowered the crime rate"-something demanded'of them at every 

conference-by the curious method of liiIDply quashing cases, 

especially if they foresaw that there would be manx defendants. 

Pinally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course 

for habitual criminals especially. Watch out there now .. witness 

in the courtroom! They will all be back soon, and it'll be a 

knife in the back of anyone who gave testimony! 

Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window, 

or slitting a pocket, or your neighbor's suitcase being ripped 

. open-shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn't see anything! 

That's how the thieves have trained us-the thieves and our 

laws! 

In September, 1955, the Literaturnaya Gazeta (which delivers 

bold judgments on-many matters-but not on literature) shed 

crocoqile tears in a major article: At night on a Moscow street 

a man had been noisily battered to death beneath the windows 

of two families. It emerged later that both families (our! Soviet! 

families) were awake, looked out the window, but did not go to 

help: the Vllives did not allow their husbands to go. And one of 

the residents in the same house (maybe he, too, was wakened, 

friend in sorrow and happiness, a member of your family, part of your own 

heart I And soon afterward they began a persistent campaign against his second 

friend-the dog. Dogs had to be registered; they were hauled off to the skin-. 

ners; and often special teams from the local soviets simply shot dead every 

dog they came acr9SS. And there were no hygienic or miserly economic reasons 

for this-the basis was much more prOfound: After all, a dog doesn't listen 

to tile radio, doesn't read the papers; he is a citizen who is, so to speak, beyond 

the control of the state, a physically strong one, moreover, but his strength 

goes not to the state but to defend his master as an individual, without regard 

to any kind of decree that might be issued against him in the local soviet and 

any kind of warrant they might come to him with at night. In Bulg~ria in 1960 

the citizens were told, and not as a joke either, to fatten up ... pigs-instead of 

their dogs I Pigs don't have principles. They grow their meat for everyone 

who has a knife. However, !he persecution of dogs never extended to those 

dogs who were usefl\l to the state-the Security and guard dogs. 

2. Like the prosecutor Golushko, lzvestiya, February 27, 1964.


but the article says nothing about that), a member of the Party 

since 1916, a retired colonel (evidently languishing without 

anything to do), had taken on himself the duty of public accuser. 

He was going around to editorial, offices and courts demandiflg 

that those two families be charged with abetting a murder. And 

the journalist thundered. also: This didn't come within the terms 

of the Criminal Code, but it was a disgrac~! A disgt;acel 

Yes, it was a disgrace, but for whom? As always in our prejudiced 

press, everything was said in this essay except the main 

thing. That: 

1. ''The Voroshilov Amnesty" of March 27, 1953, seeking 

to win popularity with the people, flooded the whole country with 

a wave of murderers, bandits, and thieves, who had with great 

difficulty be~ rounded up after the war. (To par40n a thief 

~ is to kill a good man.) 

2. In the Criminal Code of 1926 there was a most stupid 

Article 139-"on the limits of necessary self-def~nse"-acording 

to which you had the right to unsheath your knife only 

after the criminal's knife was hovering-ever you. And you could 

stab him only after he had stabbed you. And otherwise you would 

be the one put on trial. (And there was no article in our legislation 

saying that the greater criminal was the one who attacked 

someone weaker than himself.) This fear of exCeeding the meaSure 

of necessary self-defense led to total spinclessness as a national 

characteristic. A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army 

man Aleksandr Zakharov outside a club. Z8kharov took olit 

a folding penknife and killed the hoodlum. And for this he got ..• 

ten years' for plain murder! "And what was I supposed to do?" he 

asked, astonished. Prosecutor Artsishevsky replied: "You should 

have fled!" 

SQ tell me, who creates hoodlums?! 

3. The state, in its Criminal Code, forbids citizens to. have 

firearms or other weapons, but does not itself undertake to defend 

them! The state turns its citizens over to the power of the bandits 

-and then through the press dares to stimmon them to "social 

resistance" against these bandits. Resistance with what? With 

. umbrellas? With rolling pins? First they multiplied the bandits 

and then, in order to resist them, began to assemble people's 

vigilaIi.tes. (druzhina) , • which by acting outside the legislation 

sometimes tlfrned into the very same thing. But then, how could 

432 I THE GULAG ARCHI!"ELAGO 

they "have simply forced them to bow their heads beneath the 

yoke of the law" from the very begin'ning! The One-and-Only 

Tl"Jle Teaching again blocked the path. 

So what would have happened if those wives had let their husbands 

go out, and if the husbands had run out with clubs? Either 

the bandits would have killed them too-which is more·likelyor 

else they would have killed the bandits-and gone to prisori for 

exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense. The retired colonel 

taking his dog'out for its morning walk could in both cases have 

relished the consequences. 

Any genuine initiative like that shown in the French film The 

Watertront at Dawn, in which the workers went about catching 

thieves and punishing them themselves without the knowledge of 

the authorities, would in oUr country have been suppressed as 

illicit! Could one even imagine that way of thinking and that 

sort of film in our' country? 

But that is not all! There is one more important feature of our 

public life which helps thieves and bandits p~osper-fear of publicity. 

O~ newspapers are filled with reports on production victories 

which are a big bore to everyone, but you will find no 

reports of trials or crime in them. (After all, according to the 

Progressive Doctrine, criminal activity arises only from the presence 

of classes; we have no classes in our country, therefore there 

is no crime and therefore you cannot write about it in the press! 

We simply cannot afford to give the American newspapers evidence 

that we have not fallen behind the United States in criminal 

activity!) If there is a murder in the West, photographs of.the criminal 

are .plastered on:the walls of buildings, they peer out at one 

from the counters of bars, the windows of streetcars, and the criminal 

feels himself a persecuted rat. If a brazen murder is committed 

here, the press is silent, there are no· photographs; the 

murderer goes sixty IniIes away ~o another province and lives 

there in peace and quiet. And the Minister of Internal Affairs will 

not have to answer questions in parliament as to why the criminal 

has not been found; after all, no one knows about the 

case except the inhabitants of that little town. If they find 

him-well and good; if not-that is all right too. The murderer 

. . . hasn't violated the state border,so he isn't dangerous 

enough (to the sta~) to justify proclaiming a countrywide 

search for him.

The Soci~ly Friendly I 433 

It was the same with criminal activity as it was with malaria. 

It was simply announced one day that it no longer existed in our 

country, and from then on it became impossible to treat it or even 

to diagnose it. 

Of course,. botli the police and the courts were inclined to 

close cases. But that led to formalities which played even more 

into the hands of the real murderers and bandits: they would accuse 

anyone at all of an unsolved case, whoever happened to be 

nearest at hand, imd they were particularly fond of hanging sev~ 

eral crimesqn someone already guilty of one. It is worthwhile 

recalling here the case of Pyotr KiziloyB who was twice, without 

any clues or evidence, sentenced to be shot (!) for a murder he 

had not committed. Or the case of Alekseyentsev,4 whiCh was 

similar. If lawyer Popov's letter about the Kizilov case had come 

not to lzvestiya but to the Times, it would have resulted in a 

change of the queen's judge or a government crisis. But in our 

country, four months later, the provincial Party committee (why 

the provincial Party committee-was the court subordinate to 

it?) met and, taking into consideration the "youth and lack of 

experience" of the investigator (why do they entrust people's 

fates to such people?) and his "participation i~ the War of the 

Fathtliland" (for some reason they didn't take it into consideration 

with us in our time!), entered an official reprimand in one person's 

record arid wagged a threatening finger at somebody else. 

And for using torture (this being already after the Twentieth. 

Congress), the chief executioner Yakovenko was allegedly sentenced 

to three years a full half-year later, but since he was "one 

of our own" and was acting on instructions, carrying out orders 

from above--is it likely that he was actually compelled to serve 

his sentence? Such vindictiveness? But defense lawyer Popov, 

for, example, had to be dealt with and driven out of Belgorod: 

He should learn the thieves', the countrywide, principle "If they're 

not [beat]ing you-then don't lie down and ask for it." . 

And so it is that anyone who speaks out on behalf of justice 

comes to repent thrice over, eight times over, that he ever did so. 

This is how the system of punishment is turned around so as to 

be an encouragement to thieves. And for: decades they flourished 

like an unruly mold on our freedom, and in prisons and in camps. 

3. lzvestlya, December 11, 1959, and April, 1960. 

4. lzvestiya, January 30, 1960. 


• 

And there is always that sanctifying lofty theory for everything. 

It was by no means the least significant of our literary figures 

who determined that the thieves were our allies in the build- 

. ing of Communism. This was set forth in textbooks on Soviet 

corrective-labor policy (there were such textbooks, they were 

published!), in dissertations and scientific essays on camp management, 

and in the most practical way of al-~n the regulations 

on which the high-ranking camp officials were trained. All this 

flowed from the One-and-Only True Teaching, which explained 

all the iridescent life of humanity ... in terms of the class struggle 

and it alone. . 

And here is how it was worked out. Professional criminals can 

in no sense be equated with capitalist elements (Le., engineers, 

students, agronomists, and "nuns"), for the latter are steadfastly 

hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, while the' former are 

only (!) politically unstable! (A professional murderer is only 

politically. unstable!) The lumpenproletarian is not a property 

owner, and therefore cannot ally himself with the hostile-class 

elements, but will much more willingly ally himself with the 

proletariat (you just wait!). That is why in the official terminology 

of Gulag they are called socially friendly elements. (Tell me 

who your friends are . . .) That is why the regulations repeated 

over and over again': Trust the recidivist criminals! That is why 

through the Cultural and, Educational Section a consistent effort 

was supposed to be made to explain to the thieves the unity of 

their class interests with those of all the workers, to indoctrinate 

them in a "suspicious and, hostile attitude toward the 'kulaks' and 

counterrevolutionaries," and the authorities were to "place their 

hopes in these attitudes"! (Remember Averbakh: He taught 

you to steal! You never would have stolen on your own! And remember: 

Fan the class struggle in the camps.) 

The "packed-up"· thief G. Minayev wrote me a letter in the 

Literaturnaya Gazeta:o "I was even proud that although a thief I 

S. "Zavyazat"-''!o knot up" (one's bag) = "to pack up"-was thieves' 

jargon for leaving the thieves' law with the consent of the underworld to join 

the life of the suckers. 

- 6. November 29, 1962.

The_ S~cialy Friendly I 435 

was not a traitor and betrayer. On every convenient occasion they 

tried to teach us thieves that we were not lost to our Motherland, 

that even if we were profligate sons, we were nonetheless sons. But 

there was no place for the 'Fascists' on this earth." 

And the theory also held that it was necessary to study and 

make u~e of the best traits of the thieves. They loved romanticism? 

So "the orders of. the camp chiefs must be enveloped in 

an aura of romanticism." They strove toward heroism? Give 

them the heroism of work! (If they would accept it ... ) They 

had an adventurous spirit? Give them the adventure" of competition! 

(Those who know both the camps and the thieves find it 

hard to believe tIlat all this was not written by imbeciles.) Were 

they conceited? Did they like to be the center of attention? Play 

up to their conceit with praise, with honors! Promote them into 

positions of leadership! Particularly the ringleaders, so as to employ 

their already establiShed authority among the thieves for the 

purposes of the camp. (That is exactly what it says in Averbl!k1!:.s 

monograph: the authority of the ringleaders!) 

But when this elegant theory came down to earth in camps, 

here is 'Yhat emerged from it: The most inveterate and hardened 

thieves were given unbridled power on the islands of the Archipelago, 

in camp districts, and in camps-power over the population 

of their own country, over the peasants, the pe~ 

bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia; power they had never before 

had in history, never in any state in all the world, power which 

they couldn't even dream of out in freedom .. And now they were 

given all other people as slaves. What bandit would ever decline 

such power? The central thieves, the top-level thieves, totally 

controlled the camp districts. they lived in individual "cabins" 

or tents with their own temporary wives. (Or arbitrarily picking 

over the "smooth broads" from among their subjects, they had 

the i;tellectual women 58's and the girl students to vary their 

menu. In Norillag, Chlivdarov heard a moll offer her thief husband: 

"Would you like me to treat you to a sixteen-year-old collective-farm 

girl?" This was a peasant girl who had been sent 

to the North for ten years because of one kilo of grain. The" girl 

tried to resist, but the moll soon broke her will: "I'll cut you up! 

~D you think ... I'm any worse than you? I lie under him!") 

And they had their own lackeys too-servants from among the 

sloggers who carried out their chamber pots. They had their food 


prepared separately, using the little bit of meat and good fat 

issued for the common pot. The thieves who. were one rank lower 

carried out the managerial, tasks. of the work assigners, the 

deputies for auxiliary services, and the commandants, and in the 

morning they used to stand in pair~, with clubs, at the exits from 

the tents for two and corinnand: "Leave without the last one!" 

The lesser hoodlums were used to beat up the work shirkers- 

that is, those who no longer had the strength left to drag themselves 

to work. (The chief of Taimyr Peninsula used to drive up 

to the line-up in his sedan and admire the way the thieves beat up 

the 58's.) Lastly, the thieves who were able to "chirp"-in other 

w?rds, to talk glibly-was.hed the dirt off their necks and were 

appointed instructors. They gave speeches, lectured the 58's on 

how to live, themselves lived on what they stole, and got time off 

sentence. On the Belomor Canal an ugly mug like that-an instructor 

from among the socially friendly-who Understood nothing 

about the business of construction, could abrogate the construction 

orders of a socially hostile construction supervisor. 

And this was not only a question of theory translated jnto 

practice, but also of the harmony of everyday life. It was better 

for the thieves that way. And it was quieter and easier for the 

chiefs that way: not to tire their arms (with beatings) or their 

throats, not to get involved in details, and even not to appear in 

the camp compound. And it was much better for the business of 

oppression; the thieves carried it out much more brazenly, much 

more brutally; and without the least fear of responsibility before 

the law. 

But even in places where the thieves were not given such 

power, they were all, on the basis of this same class theory, very 

much favored. H the thieves left-the camp compound, that was 

the biggest sacrifice that could be asked of them. At work they 

could lie about as much as they pleased, smoke, tell their stories 

(of victories, escapes, heroism), and warm themselves in the sun 

in summer and at the bonfire in winter. Their bonfires we:t:e never 

touched by the guards, but the bonfires of the 58's were scattered 

and stamped out. But the cubes-the' cubic yards--of timber, 

earth, or coal were then stolen from the 58's.T.And in addition 

7. The custom of living off someone else's cl/bage-work output-is maintained 

by the thief after he is released too, even though at first glance this would 

contradict his adherence to socialism. In 1951 at Oimyakon (Ust-Ne.ra), the

The Socially Friendly 437 

they even took thieves to the rallies of shock workers, which on 

the whole were rallies of the recidivists (DmitIag, and the Belamor 

Canal). 

Now here is one female thief-Beregovaya. (illustration No. 

38.) She got herself into the glorious chronicles of the Moscow 

Volga Canal. She was the scourge of every jail she was ever in 

and raised hell in every police station; If she ever h!l'i a whim to 

do some work, she immediately destroyed whatever she had done. 

With her necklace of sentences she had been sent to. Dmitlag 

in July, 1933. The chapter of legends continues: She went into 

the India barracks and, to her astonishment (and the only thing 

believable is that astonishment), heard no mother oaths and saw 

no card games. They were supposed to have explained to her that 

the thieves there enjoyed their work. And she immediately went 

off to the excavations and even began to work ''Well." (Read this 

to mean that they credited her with the cubic yards of other people-just 

look at that face!) And then comes the chapter of 

truth: In October (when it got cold) she went to the physician, 

and even though she was not iII she asked him (wi~ a knife up 

her sleeve?) for several days off. The physician willingly agreed 

(he always had many.places available!). And the wor~ assigner 

was an old girl friend of Beregovaya named Potyakova, and on 

her own account she added two weeks of loafing by setting up 

fake workdays for her. (More cubic yards were stolen from the 

stoggers.) And right then and there, seeing the enviable life of 

a work assigner, Beregovaya decided she would like to become 

a bitch too. And that very day, when Polyakova wakened her to 

go out to line-up, Beregovaya declared she would not go out to 

dig dirt before she had exposed Polyakova's machinations with 

workdays, output, and rations. (She was not particularly held 

thief Krokhalyov was freed and took on a job as a coal mirier at that same 

mine. He never even lifted a sledge, but the mine foreman recorded a record 

output for him-by stealing from the zeks. Krokhalyov received from eight 

to nine· thousand rubles per month, and .he brought the zeks a thousand rubles' 

worth of food 10 bolt, and they were glad enough of this and kept their mouths 

shut. In 1953 the brigadier, a prisoner, Milyuchikhin, tried to break up this 

system. The free thieves cut him up, and 'he was charged with robbery. He 

was tried and got a renewal of his twenty years. . 

Now this note should not be understood as an amendment of the Marxist 

thesis that thelumpenproletarianis not a propertv oWller. Of course he isn't! 

Krokhalyov didn't use his eight thousand to build himself a private house: he 

lost them at cards, drank them, or spent them on the broads. 


back by any feeling of gratitude!) She managed to get called in 

to see the security officer. (The thieves were ]],ot afraid of the 

security officers, because no second term threatened them, but 

just let some KR women try to avoid going out to work!) And 

right away she became a brigadier of the lagging men's brigade 

(evidently she had promised to kick in the teeth of these last- 

. leggers), and then ... a work assigner in Polyakova's place, I1I!d 

then ... an·instructor in the women's barracks. (This expert in 

oaths, this card shark, this thief!) And then . • . chief of a construction 

detachment. (She was already ordering engiJieers 

around.) And all the red bulletin boards of Dmitlag displayed 

this toothy bitch smiling there (see the picture) in a leather 

jacket and with a field pouch (filched from someone). Those 

hands of hers were skilled at beating men. The eyes are those of 

a witch. This woman was praised by Averbakh! 

So easy were the paths of the thieves in camp: a bit of scandal, 

a bit of betrayal, and from there on beat and stomp. 

People will object that it was only the bitches who accepted 

positions, while the "honest thieves" held to the thieves' law. 

But no matter how much I saw of one and the other, I never 

could.see that one rabble was nobler than the other. The thieves 

knocked gold teeth out of Estonians' mouths with a poker. The 

thieves (in Kraslag, in 1941) drowned Lithuanians in the toilet 

for refusing to turn over a food parcel to them. The thieves used 

to plunder prisoners sentenced to death. Thiev.es would jokingly 

kill the first cellmate who came their way just to get a new interrogation 

and trial, and spend the winter in a warm place, or to 

get out of a hard camp into which they had fallen. So why men 

·tion such petty details as stripping the clothes or shoes from someone 

out in subzero temperatures? And why mention stolen rations? 

No, you'll not get fruit from a stone, nor good from a thief. 

The theoreticians of Gulag were indignant; the kulaks (in 

camp) didn't even regard the thieves as real people (thereby, so 

to speak, betraying their true bestial colors). 

But how can you regard them as people if they tear your heart 

out of your body and suck on it? All their ''romantic bravado" 

is the bravado of vampires. 8 

8. People in educated circles who have not themselves encountered thieves on 

their narrow path may object to such a merciless estimate of the thieves' world:


• 

But enough! Let us say a word in defense of the thieves also. They 

had their own "original code" and their own original concept of 

honor. But it was not a question of their being patriots, as our . 

bureaucrats and writers would have liked to have it, but of . 

their being absolutely consistent materialists and qonsistent 

pirates. And even though the dictatorship of the proletariat was 

so assiduous in courting them, they did not re&pect it even for 

one minute. 

This tribe came into this world ..• to live! And !!jnce they were 

destined to spend as much time in prison as in freedom, then they 

wanted to gather life's flowers in prison too; and what did they 

care about-the purpose for which the prison was planned or the 

suffering of others bes~de them there? They were unruly, and they 

-enjoyed the fruits of that unruliness there-so why should they 

worry about the man who bowed his head 'and died a slave? They 

had to e.at---so they took whatever they could see that was edible 

and tasty. They had to drink:.......so they sold the convoy guards the 

things they had taken from their neighbors for vodka:. They had 

to sleep on something sOft-:-and, despite their manly looks, it 

was considered quite honorable for them to carry their own pillow 

with them, as well as a padded blanket or feather quilt. (The 

~om so because one could hide a knife in it very well.) They 

loved the rays of the beneficent sun,' and if they couldn't take a 

trip to a Black Sea resort, they tanned theIDSelves on the roofs of 

their construction projects, in the stone quarries, at the mine 

entrances. (Let someone stupider go down into the mines.). They 

, 38. Beregovaya 

Was it not a secret love of private property that motiva.ted those whom the 

thieves so irked? I insist on my own expression: vampires sucking your heart. 

They defile absolutely everything that for us pertains to the natural sphere of 

humanity. !Jut is it really so hopeless? After all, the thieves are not born with 

these traits. But, where is .the .good side of their hearts? I don't know. Probably 

it has been killed and suppressed by the thieves' law in accordance with 

which the rest of us are not people. We have already written about the threshold 

of evildoing. Evidently, the thief who has absorbed the thieves' law has irreversibly 

crossed some moral threshold. People will also object: But you saw 

only the petty thieves. The important real thieves, the big shots of the thieves' 

world,. were all. shot in 1937. And, in truth, I did not see the thieves of the 

twenties. But I simply do not have imagination enough to picture them as moral 

beings.


had magnificent, well-fed muscles, bunched in rippling knots. 

They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way 

gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, even their moral 

needs: on one another's chests, stomachs, and backs they could 

admire powerful eagles perched on cliffs or flying through the 

sky. Or the big hammer, the sun,with its rays sho~g out in 

every direction; or'women and men copulating; or the individual 

organs of_their sexual enjoyment; and, all of a slidden, next to 

their hearts were Lenin or Stalin or perhaps both· (and this meant 

exactly the same·as the crucifix around a thiefs neck)., Sometimes 

-they would laugh at a droll stoker hurling coal into their 

rear orifice, or a monkey engaged in masturbation. And they 

would read slogans on' each other which, even if they were already 

familiar, they nonetheless dearly loved to repeat! "-- 

all the girls ,in the mouth!" And it sounded as triumphant as ~'I 

am King ~sargodon!" Or else on a girl thiefs stomach there 

might be: "I will die for a hot ---!" And even the modest 

and tiny moral on an arm, an arm which had already buried a 

dozen knives in somebody's ribs: "Remember your mother's 

words!" Or else: "I remember caresses. 1 remember my.mother." 

(The thieves had a mQther cult, a formality, however, which did 

not mean faithfulness to 'her teachings.) 

In order to intensify their sensations in their swift-running 

lives they used to love taking drugs., The easiest drug to get was 

"anasha"--.marijuana-from hemp. It was' also known among 

them as plantchik and was rolled into a smoke. They even Used 

to sing about it gratefully in their songs: 

Plantchik, plantchik, God's grass taIl, 

Joy of pickpockets, one and all. * . 

Yes, they do not recognize the earthly institution of private 

property, and in this respect they really are hostiie to the bourgeoisie 

and to those Communists who have dachas and automobiles. 

Everything they come across on life's path they take as 

their own (if it is not too dangerous). Even when they have. a 

surfeit of everything, they reach out to grab what belongs to 

others because any unstolen article makes a thief sick at heart. 

They wear the clothes they have stolen while they havenoveIty, 

until they tire of them, and soon afterward lose them at cards. 

Card games thal: last for several nights on end ~ve them their 


most powerful sensations, and in this respect they have far outdone 

the Russian nobility of past eras. They can even gamble an 

eye for stakes (and tear out the loser's eye on the spot). And 

they can also play for beneath themselves-the stakes being the 

right to use the loser for perverted enjoyment. And when they 

lose, they declare a general frisking on a barge or in a barracksuntil 

they find something else belonging to one of the suckers. 

And then the game goes on. 

The thieves don't like to work, and why should they when 

they get food, drink, and clothing without it? Of course, this 

constitutes a. barrier between them and the working class. (But 

does the working class love work that much either? Isn't it for the 

bitter money that the working class strains its sinews, having no 

other way to earn it?) Not oilly can the thieves not "be carried 

away by their enthusiasm for labor," but labor is repulsive to 

them, and they know how to express this dramatically. For example, 

if they are sent off on an agricultural work party and 

forced to leave the camp compound in order to rake up vetch 

and oats for forage, they don't .simply sit down and rest, but 

they gather all the rakes and forks in a heap and set fire to them 

and then warm themselves at the bonfire. (Socially hostile foreman! 

Make a decision. . . .) 

When they tried to compel them to fight for their Motherland, 

. it was useless. Their Motherland is the whole earth. The conscripted 

thieves went off in transports siJlging their song as they 

swayed back and forth: 

aU} cause is right! 

Our cause is left! 

Why is everyone on the lam? 

Why, why indeed? 

And then they would steal something, get themselves arrested, 

and take a familiar prisoner transport back to prison in the rear. 

Even the surviving Trotskyites applied from camp to be allowed. 

to serve at the front; the thieves ·did not make any such applications. 

But when the operational armies began to surge into 

Europe, and the smell of booty grew strong, they put on uniforms 

andwent-off to plunder at the heels of the army. (They jokingly 

called themselves "The Fifth Ukrainian Front.") 

But-and in this, too, they were much more' principled than 

the 58's-no Zhenka Zhogol or Vaska Kishkenya, with rolled-

"The Socially Friendly I 443 

down boot tops, respectfully pronouncing that sacred word 

"thief," with a one-sided grimace, would ever be caught helping 

to strengthen the yrison-digging in posts, stringing barbed wire, 

trenching the no-man's land at the camp perimeter, repairing the 

gatehouse, -fixing the perimeter lighting. In this lay the thiefs 

honor. Prison had been created ~ the enemy of his freedomand 

he could not work for prison! (However, he did not run any 

risk of getting Article 58 for refusing to work, whereas the poor 

enemy of the people would immediately have had Counter-Revolutionary 

Sabotage hung on him. The thieves were bold and impudent 

because of their own impunity, for, as the saying goes: 

Whoever has been mauled by a bear is likely to be afraid of a 

stump.) 

It was totally out of the question to see a thief with a newspaper. 

The thieves held firm to their belief that politics was 

twaddle, without relation to real life. Neither did they read books, 

or at least only very rarely. But they loved oral literature, and 

any storyteller who could endlessly string out "novels" for them 

after curfew would always be well fed out of their booty and held 

in esteem by them, as are all storytellers and singers among 

primitive peoples. These "novels" were a fanciful and rather 

monotonous amalgam of dime novels about life in high society 

( obligatorily high society!), peopled with titled viscounts, counts," 

and marquises, and with their own thieves' legends, their own 

self-magnification, their own thieves' jargon, and their thieves' 

concepts of the luxurious life which the hero always had" to 

achieve in the end: the countess would lie down 011 hi$ "cot," he 

would smoke only the very best "Kazbek," would own" an "Qnion" 

-a watch-and his prokhorva (his. boots) would be shined to a 

high gloss. . 

Nikolai Pogodin was sent on an official visit to the Belomor 

Canal and probably used up no small amount of Soviet government 

money-yet he didn't see through the thieves, didn't understand 

them, and told lies about everything. Since in our literature 

nothing has been written about the camps for forty years except 

Pogodin's play-and the subsequent film-we have to comment 

~o " 

The wretchedness of the KR engineers who stared into the 

mouths of their instructors and thereby learned how to live does 

not even require comment. But his aristocrats, his thieves; do. 

Pogodin even contrived not to notice in them their simple char- 


acteristic of robbing by the right of the strong, not secretly like 

a pickpocket. He portrayed them all to a man as petty pickpockets, 

and more than a dozen times he points this up in the 

play to the point of nausea, and he has the thieyes steal from the 

thieves (utter nonsensel they steal only' from the suckers and turn 

everything over to their ringleader). Neither did Pogodin understand 

(or he did not wish to understand) the real stimuli of camp 

work---.,.hunger, beatings, and the collective responsibility of the 

brigade. He did not even distinguish between the camp inmate 

who was a "comrade" and the one who was a "citizen." He 

latched on to only one thing: the "sOCially friendly" character of 

the thieves. (Which he was prompted to by the canal administration 

in Medvezhyegorsk, and even befo~e that by Gorky in Moscow.) 

And he rushed to show the "reforging" of the thieves. And 

what came out was such an outrageous libel of the thieves that 

even I want' to defend them against it. 

They are much smarter thanPog~in shows them-or Sheinin 

either. And you couldn't buy them with some kind of cheap 

reforging, simply because their world outlook was closer to real 

life that that of tb,e prison chiefs-it was more integrated lind 

, contained no elements of idealism whatever! Yet all those incantations 

to starving people to work and die at work-pure 

idealism. And if in speaking to a citizen chief or a correspondent 

from Moscow or at an absurd meeting, there appeared a tear in 

their eye and a tremor in their voice--that was because they 

were playing a well-calculated role aimed at getting them privileges 

or time off sentence. And inside himself meanwhile the thief 

was laughing the whole time! The thieves understood the joke 

very well indeed. (But the visiting writers from the capital 

didn't.) It was impossible for the bitch Mitya to enter the cell of 

a Strict Regimen Company unarmed, without a jailer, and for 

the local thief ringleader Kostya to crawl beneath the bunks to 

hide from him! Kostya, of co~rse, had a knife ready, and if he 

hadn't, he would have hurled himself on Mitya to choke him, and 

one of the two would have been dead. Now that was no joke- 

jUjlt the opposite--but Pogodin creates a banal joke. The horrifying 

hypocrisy of the "re-education" of Sonya (why? what forced 

her to take up a wheelbarrow?) and through her Kostya too?! 

And the two thieves becoming guards? (The nonpolitical offenders 

could have done that, but not thieves I ) And all that 

competition between brigades was quite out of the question for


the cynical, sober thieves-except maybe for the sake of laughs 

at the free workers. AiJ.d the most irritatingly false note of all 

was the thieves' asking to be given the rules for creating a commune! 

It would have been impossible to slander the thieves more or 

to make them more stupid! The thieves aSking for rules! The 

thieves knew their own rules perfectly well-from the first robbery 

to the last knife blow in the neck. Whe~ you coUld beat a 

person who was down on the ground. And when five coUld attack 

one. And when they cou1d attack a person who was sleeping. 

And for their own commune they had rules which predated the 

Communist Manifesto. 

Their commune, more precisely their world, was a separate 

world within our world, and the strict laws which for centuries 

had existed in it for strengthening that world did not in any 

degree depend on our "suckers" legislation or even on the Party 

Congresses. They had their own laws of senionty, by which their 

ringleaders were not elected at all, yet when they entered a cell 

or a camp compoqnd already wore their crown of power and 

were immediately recognized as chiefs. These ringleaders might 

have strong intellectual capacities, and always had a clear comprehension 

of the thieves' philosophy, as well as a sufficient number 

of murders and robberies behind them. The thieves had their 

own courts ("pravflki"), founded on the code of thieves' "honor" 

and tradition. The sentences of the court were merciless and were 

executed implacably, even if the condemned person was quite out 

of reach and in a completely different camp compound. (The 

types of punishment inflicted were unusual; they might all jump 

in turn from the upper bunks onto a convicted person lying on 

the floor and thus break his rib cage.) 

And what did their word "frayersky"-"of the suckers" 

mean? It meant what was universally human, what pertained to 

all normal people. And it was precisely this universally human 

world, our world, with its morals, customs, and mutual relationships, 

which was most hateful to the thieves, most subject to their 

ridicUle, counterposed most sharply to their own antisocial, anti- 

. public kubla-or clan. 


off class theory and social friendliness, Stalin gave orders that 

the thieves be incarcerated in isolators, in solitary long-term cells, 

and even 1;hat new prisons be built for them (the "shut-ups," as 

the thieves oalled them). 

In these "shut-ups," or isolators, the thieves swiftly wilted, 

sickened, and began to die. Because a parasite cannot live in 

isolation, by itself. It has to" live on somebody, twining itself 

around the Victim: 

No, it was not "re-education" which began to. break the back 

of the thieves' world (the "re-education" merely helped them return 

faster to new robberies) ; it was when, in the fifties, brushing


Chapter 17 

• 

'-. 

The Kids 

The Archipelago had many ugly mugs and many bared fangs. 

No matter what side you approached it from, there wasn't one 

you could admire. But perhaps the most abominable of all was 

that maw that swallowed up the kids, . 

The kids were not at all those besprizorniki or waifs in drab 

tatters who scurried hither and thither thieving and warming 

themselves at asphalt caldrons on the streets, without whom one 

could not picture the urban life of the twenties. The waifs were 

taken from the streets-not from their families-into the colonies 

for juvenile delinquents (there was one attached to the People's 

Commissariat of Education as early as 1920; it would be interesting 

t~know, too, how things went with juvenile offenders before 

the Revolution), into workhouses for juveniles (which existed 

frDm 1921 to 1930 and had bars, bolts, and jailers, so111at in the 

outworn bourgeois terminology they could have been cl!lled 

prisons), and also into the "Labor Communes _of the OGPU" 

from 1924 on. They had been orphaned by the Civil War, by its 

famine, by social disorganization, the execution of their parents, 

or the death of the latter at the front, and at that time justice 

really did try to return these children to the mainstream of life, 

removing them from their street apprenticeship as thieves. Factory 

apprenticeship began in the labor communes. And this was 

a privileged situation in the context of those years of unemployment, 

and many of the lads there learned with a will. From 1930 

on, for sentenced juveniles, Factory Apprenticeship Schools of a 

special type yvere created, under the People's Commissariat of 

447 

Justice. The young offenders had to work from four to six hours 

a day, for which they received wages on the basis of the All 

Union Code of Labor Laws, and for the rest of their day they 

studied and played. And perhaps things might have been set to 

rights on this path. 

But where did the young offenders come from? They came 

from Article 12 of the Criminal Code of 1926, which permitted 

children from the age of twelve to be sentenced for theft, assault, 

mutilation, and murder (Article 58 offenses were also included 

under this)leading), but they had to be given moderate sentences, 

not "the whole works" like adults. Here was the first crawl hole 

into the Archipelago for the future "kids"-but it was not yet a 

wide gate. 

We are not going to omit one interesting statistic: In 1927 - 

prisoners aged sixteen (they didn't count the younger ones) to 

twenty-four represented 48 percent of all prisoners. 1 

What this amounts to is that nearly half the entire Archipelago 

in 1927 consisted of youths whom the October Revolution had 

caught between the ages of six and fourteen. Ten years after the 

victorious Revolution these same girls and boys turned· up in 

prison and constituted half· the prison population! This jibes 

poorly with the struggle against the vestiges of bourgeois consciousness. 

which we inherited from the old society, but figures 

are figures. They demonstrate 'that the Archipelago never was 

short of young people. 

But the question of how young was decided in 1935. In that 

year the Great Evildoer once more left his thumbprint on ~story's 

submissive clay. Among such deeds as the destruction of 

Leningrad and the destruction of his own Party, he did not overlook 

the children-the children whom he loved so well, whose 

Best Friend he was, and with whom he therefore had his photograph 

taken. Seeing no other way to bridle those insidious 

mischiefmakers, those washerwomen's brats, who were overrunning 

the country in thicker and thicker swarms and growing more 

and more brazen in their violations of socialist legality, he invented 

a gift for them: These children, from twelve years of age 

(by this time his beloved daughte~ was approaching that borderline, 

and he could see that age tangibly before his eyes ), should 

1. Vyg)tinsky, op. cit .• p. 333.

The Kids I 449 

be sentenced to the whole works in the Code. In other words, 

''with the application of an measures of punishment," as the 

Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of 

People's Commissars of April 7, 1935, elucidated. (Including, 

that is, capital punishment as well.) . 

Illiterates that we were, we scrutinized decrees very little at 

the time. More and more we gazed at the portraits of Stalin with 

a black-haired little girl in his arms .... Even less did the twelveyear-olds 

read the decrees. Ai:J.d the decrees kept coming out, 

one after another. On December 10, 1940, the sentencing of 

juveniles from the age of twelve for "putting various objects on 

riUIroad tracks." (This was training young diversionists.) On 

May 31, 1941, it was decreed that for all other varieties of crime 

not included in Article 12 juveniles were to be given full sen- 

. tences from the age of fourteen on! 

But here a small obstacle arose: the War of the Fatherland 

began. But the law is the law! And on July 7, 1941-four dll-Ys 

after Stalin's panicky speech in the days when German tanks 

were driving toward Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kiev-one more 

decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was issued, and it 

is difficult now to say in what respect it is more interesting for 

us today-itt its unwavering academic character, showing what 

important' questions were being decided by the government in 

those flaming days, or in its actual contents. The situation was 

that the Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R. (Vyshinsky?) had complained 

to the Supreme Soviet about the Supreme Court (which means 

His Graciousness had heard about the matter), because the 

courts were applying the Decree of 1935 incorrectly and these 

brats were being sentenced only when they had intentionally 

committed crimes. But this was impermissible softness! And so 

right in the heat of war, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 

elucidated: This interpretation does not correspond to the text 

of the law. It introduces limitations not provided for by the law! 

And in agreement with the prosecutor, the Presidium issued a 

clarification to the Supreme Court: Children must Qe sentenced 

and the full measure of punishment applied (in other words, "the 

whole works"), even in cases where crimes were committed not 

intentionally but as a result of carelessness. 

Now that is something! Perhaps in all world history no one 

has yet. approached such a radical solution of the problem of 


children! From twelve years on for.


·But joke or no joke, here is a scene with some such "death-row 

prisoners" in a Far EaStern camp: They were assigned to dump 

the shit from latrines. There was a cart with two enormous wheels 

and .an enormous barrel on it, full of stinking sludge. The "dea!hrow 

prisoners" were hitched up, with many of them in the shafts 

and others pushing from the sides and from behind [the barrel 

. kept swaying and splashing them]. And the. crimSon-cheeked 

bitches in their twill suits roared with laughter as they urged the 

children on with clubs. And on the prisoner transport ship from 

Vladivostok to Sakhalin in 1949, the bitches uSed these children 

at knifepoint for carnal enjoyment. So even six months was sometimes 

enough too.) 

d~ it was then that the twelve-year-olds crossed the thresholds 

of the adult prison cells, were equated with adults as citizens possessing,full 

rights, equated by virtue of the most savage prison 

terms, equated, in their whole unconscious life, by bread rations, 

bowls of gruel, their places on the sleeping shelves-that is when 

that old term of Communist re-education, "minors," somehow lost 

its significance, when the outlines of its meaning faded,. became 

unclear-and Gulag itself gave birth to the ringing and impudent 

word "kids." And with a proud·and bitter intonation these bitter 

citizens began to use this term to describe themselves-not yet 

citizens of the country but already citizens of the Archipelago. 

So early and so strangely did their adulthood begin-with this 

step across the prison threshold! 

And upon the twelve- and fourteen-year-old heads burst a life 

style that was too much for brave men who were, experienced 

and mature. But the young people, by the laws of their young life, 

were not about to be flattened by this life style but, instead, grew 

into it and adapted to it. Just as new languages and new customs 

are learned without difficulty in childhood, so the juveniles 

adopted on the run both the language of the Archipelago-which 

was that of the thieves-and the philosophy of the Archipelagoand 

whose philosophy was that? 

From this life they took for themselves all its most inhuman essence, 

all its poisonous rotten juice-and as readily as if it had 

been this liquid, and not milk, that they had sucked fro~ their 

mothers' breasts in infancy. 

They grew into camp life so swiftly-not in weeks even, but in 

days!-as if they were not in the least surprised by it, as if that 


life:... were not completely new to them, but a natural continuation 

of their free life of yesterday. 

Even out in freedom they hadn't grown up in linens and velvets; 

it had not been the children of secure and powerful parents 

. who. had gone out to clip stalks of grain, filled their pockets with 

potatoes, been late at the factory gate, or run away from Factory 

Apprenticeship Training. The kids were the children of workers. 

Out in freedom they had understood very well that life was built 

upon injustice. But out there things had not been laid out stark 

and bare to the last extremity; some of it was dressed up in decent 

clothing, some· of it softened by a mother's kind word. In the 

Archipelago the-kiels saw the world as it is seen by quadrupeds: 

Only might makes right! Only the beast of prey has the right to 

live! That is how we, too, in our adult years saw the Archipelago, 

but we were capable of counterposing to it all our experience, 

our thoughts, our ideals, and everything that we had read to that· 

very day. Children accepted the Archipelago with the divine 

impressionability of childhood. And in a few days children became 

beasts there! And the worst kind of beasts, with no ethical 

concepts whatever (looking into the calm and enormous eyes of 

a horse or caressing the flattened ears of a guilty dog, how can 

you deny that they have ethics?). The kid masters the truth: If 

other teeth are weaker than your own, then tear the piece away 

from them. It belongs to you! 

There were two basic methods of maintaining kids in the 

Archipelago: in separate children's colonies (principally the 

. younger kids, not yet fifteen) and in mixed-category camps, most 

often with ihvalids lind women (the senior kids). 

Both were equally successful in developing animal viciousness. 

And neither rescued the kids from being educated in the spirit of 

the thieves' ideals. 

Take Yura Yermolov. He reports that when be was only twelve 

years old (in 1942) he saw a great deal of fraud, thievery, and 

speculation going on around him, and arrived at the following 

judgment about life: "The only people who do not steal and deceive 

are. those who are afraid to. As for me--l don't want to be 

afraid of anything! Which means that I, too, will steal and deceive 

and live well." And yet. for a time his life sO':l1-ehow developed 

differently. He became fascinated by the shining examples whose 

spirit he was taught in school. However, having got a taste of

, The Kids I 453 

the Beloved Father (and laureates and ministers tell us that 

this was beyond their capacities), at the age of fourteen he wrote 

a leaflet: "Down with Stalin! Hail Lenin!" They caught him on 

that o~e, beat him up, gave him 58-10, and imprisoned him. with 

the19ds and thieves. And Yura Yermolov quickly mastered the 

thieves' Jaw. The spirit of his existence spiraled .upward steeply 

--=and at the age of f~urten he had executed his "negation of a 

negation": he had re~rned to the concept of thievery· as the highest 

and the best of all existence. 

And what did he see in the children's colony? "There was even 

more injustice than in freedom. The chiefs and the jailers lived 

off the state, shielded by the correctional system. Part of the kid's 

ration went from the kitchen into the bellies of the instructors. 

The kids were beaten with boots, kept in fear so that they would 

be silent and obedient." (Here it is necessary to explain that the 

ration of the youngest juveniles was not the ordinary camp ration. 

Though it sentenced kids to long years of imprisonment, the 

government did not cc;ase to be humane. It did not forget that 

these same children were the future masters of Communism. 

Therefore they added milk and butter and real meat to their rations. 

So how could the instructors resist the temptation of dipping 

their ladle into the kids' pot? And how could they compel. the 

kids to keep silent, except by beating them with ·boots? Perhaps 

one of these kids who grew up in this way will someday relate to 

us a story more dismal than Oliver Twist?) 

The simplest reply to the overpowering injustices was to create 

injustices oneself! This was the.easie!!t conclusion, and it would· 

now become the rule of life of the kids for a long time to come 

(or even forever). 

But here is what's interesting!· In giving the cruel world battIe, 

the kids didn't battle against one another! They didn't look on 

each other as enemies!· They entered this struggle as a collective, 

a united g~up! Was this a budding socialism? The indoctrination 

of the instructors? Oh, come on, cut the cackle, big-mouths! 

This is a descent into the law of the thieves! After all, the thieves 

are united; ~er all, the thieves have their own discipline and 

their own ringleaders. And the juveniles were the apprentices of 

the thieves, they were mastering the precepts of their elders. 

Oh, of course, they were intensefy indoctrinated! Their instructors 

came-with three stars, four stars, on their shoulder 


boardS-and read them lectures on the Great War of the Fatherland, 

on the immortal feat of our people, oli the Fascist atrocities, 

on the sunny. Stalinist concern for children, on what a Soviet person 

should b~. But the Great Teaching on Society, built on economics 

alone, knowing nothing of psychology, is ignorant even of 

that simple psychological law which says that the repetition of anything. 

five and six times • • . already arouses disbelief, or even 

more than that-nausea. The kids were disgusted by whatever 

bad been earlier rammed down their throats by their teachers and 

. now by instructors who simultaneously stole from. the kitchen. 

(And even the patriotic speech of an officer from a military unit 

-"Boys! You have been entrusted with the task: of dismantling 

parachutes. This is valuable silk, the Motherland's property, try to 

take care of it!"-had no success. Rushing for overfulfillment of 

norms and to get extra dishes of cereal, the kids at Krivoshchekovo 

cut up all the silk into useless scraps.) And out of all 

the seeds sown among them, they took over only the seeds of hate 

-of hostility to the 58's and a feeling of superiority over the 

enemies of the people. . 

This was something that would come in handy later on, in the 

general camps. For the time being, however, there were no enemies 

of the people among them. Yura Yermolov was just the 

same kind of typical kid; he had long since exchanged the stupid 

political law for the wisC thieves' law. No one could avoid being 

cooked up in that mash! No boy could remain a -separate individual-he 

would be trampled, torn apart, ostracized, if he did 

not immediately declare himself a thieves' apprentice. And all of 

them took that inevitable oath .... (Reader! Put YOUT own children 

in their place .... ) 

Who was the enemy of the kids in the children's colonies? The 

jailers and the instrlictors. The struggle was against them! 

The kids knew their strength very well. The first element in 

their strength was unity, and the second impunity. It was only 

on the outside that they had been driven into here on the basis 

of the law for adults. But once in here, in the Archipelago, they 

were under the protection of a sacred taboo. "Milk, chief! Give 

us our milk!" they would howl, and beat on the door of the cell 

and break up their bunks and break all the glass in sight-all of 

which would have been termed armed rebellion or economic sabotage 

among adults. They had nothing to fear I Their milk would be 

brought them right away!


Or say they were marching a column of kids under armed guard 

through a city, and it seems even shameful to guar4 children 

so strictly. Far from it! They had worked out a plan. A whistle 

-and- all who- wanted to scattered in different directions! And 

what were the guards to do? Shoot? At whom? At children? ... 

And so their prison terms came to an end. In one fell swoop 150 

years ran away from the state. You don't enjoy looking silly? 

Then don't arrest children! 

Our future novelist (the one who spent his childhood among 

the kids) will describe to us a multitude of kids' tricks-how they 

ran riot in the colonies, how they got back at and played nasty 

tricks on their, instructors. Despite the seeming severity of the 

terms meted out to them and the camp regimen, the kids developed 

great insolence out of impunity. 

Here is one 'of their. boastful stories about themselves, which, 

knowing the typical pattern of the kids' actions, I fully believe. 

Some excited. and frightened children ran to the nurse of a chil-, 

,dren's colony and summoned her to help one of their comrades 

who was seriously ill. Forgetting caution, she quickly accom 

~inap them to their big cell for forty. And 'as soon as she was 

inside, the whole anthill went into action! Some of them barricaded 

the door and kept watch. Dozens of hands tore everything 

off her, all the clothes she had on, and toppled her over; and then 

some sat on her bands: and on l1er iegs; and then, everyone doing 

what he could and where, they raped her, kissed her, bit her. It 

was- against orders to shoot them, and no one could rescue her 

until they themselves let her go, profaned and weeping. 

In general, of course: interest in the female body begins early 

among boys, and in the kids' cells it was intensely heated up by 

colorful stories and boasting. And they never let a chance go by 

to let off steam. Here is an episode. In broad daylight in full view 

of everyone, four kids were sitting in the compound of Krivoshchekovo 

Camp No. I, talking with a girl called Lyilba from the 

bookbinding shop. She retorted sharpl}' to something they had 

said. The boys leaped up, grabbed her legs, and lifted them in the 

air. She was in a defenseless position; while she supported herself 

on the ground with her hands, her skirt fell over her head. The 

boys held her that way and caressed her with th~ir free hands. And 

then they let her down-and not roughly either. Did she slap 

them? Did she run away from them? Not at all. She sat down just 

as before and continued the argument. 

456 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE LAGO 

These were sixteen-year-old kids, and it was an adult camp, 

with mixed categories. (It was the same one that had the women's 

barracks for five hundred where all the copulation took place 

without curtains and which the kids used to enter importantly 

like men.) 

In the children's colonies the kids worked for four hours and 

then were supposed to be in school for four. (But all that schooling 

was a fake.) Whep. transferred to an adult camp, they had a 

ten-hour working day, except that their work norms were reduced, 

while their ration norms were the same as adults'. They 

were transferred at the age of sixteen, but their undernourishment 

and improper development in camp and before camp endowed 

them at that age with the appearance of small frail children. 

Their height was stunted, as were their minds and their interests. 

They were sometimes maintained in separate brigades depending 

on the kind of work they were doing, and sometimes they were 

mixed into a general brigade with elderly invalids. Here, too, 

"reduced physical labor" was required of them, or simply native 

child labor. 

After the children's colony their situation changed drastically. 

No longer did they get the children's ration which so tempted ' 

the jailers-and therefore the latter ceased to be their principal 

enemy. Some old men appeared in their lives on whom they 

could try their strength. Women appeared on whom they could 

try their maturity. Some real live thieves appeared, fat-faced 

camp storm troopers, who willingly undertook their guidance 

both in world outlook and in training in thievery. To learn from 

them was teinpting-and not to learn from them was impossible. 

For a free reader does the word "thief' perhaps sound like a reproach? 

In that case he has understood nothing. This word is 

pronounced in the underworld in the same way that the word 

"knight" was pronounced among the nobility-and with even 

greater esteem, and not loudly but softly, like a sacred word. 

To become a worthy thief someday ... was the kid's dream. This 

was the elemental motivating force of their companionship. Yes, 

for even the most independent among them, 

For a young man, pondering life, 

there was no. destiny more reliable. 

On one occasion, at the Ivanovo Transit Prison, I spent the


night in a cell for kids. In the next bunk to me was a thin boy 

just over fifteen-called Slava, I think. It appeared to me that 

he was going through the whole kid ritual somehow unwillingly, 

as if he were growing out of it or was weary of it. I thought to 

myself: This boy has not perished, and is more intelligent, and he 

will soon move away from the others. And we had a chat. The 

boy came from Kiev. One of his parents had died, and the other 

had abandoned him. Before the war, at the age of nin~, Slava began 

to steal. He also stole "when our army came," and after the 

war, and, with a sad, thoughtfUl smile which was so old for fifteen, 

he explained to me that in the futUre, too,- he intended to live 

only by thievery. "You know," he explained to me very reasonably, 

"that as a worker you can earn only bread and water. And 

my childhood was bad so I want to live well." "What did you do 

during the German occupation?" I asked, trying to fill in the 

two years he had bypassed without describhig them-the two 

years of the oc~upation of Kiev. He shook his head. "Under the 

Germans I worked. What do you think-that I could have gone 

on stealing under the Germans? They shot you on the spot for 

that." 

And in adult camps, too, the kids retained, as the principal 

characteristic of their conduct, their concerted action in attack 

and their concerted .action in resistance.· This made them strong 

and freed them from restrictions. In their consciousness there was 

no demarcation line between what was permissible and what was 

not permissible, and no concept whatever of good and evil. For 

them everything that they desired was good and everything that 

hindered them was bad. They acquired their brazen and insolent 

manner of behavior because it was the most advantageous 

form of conduct in the camp. And dissimulation and cunningserved 

·them very well in situations where strength could not 

carry the day. A kid could play the ·role of a boy saint. He could 

move you to tears. And all the while his comrades ransacked 

your bag behind your back. That rancorous company of theirs 

could wreak its vengeance on anyone at all-and just so as not 

to get mixed up with that horde, no one would come to the aid of 

their victim. When their purpose' had been attained and their 

s~imene divided, the kids would then hurl themselves in a pack on 

the single victim. And they were invincible! So many of them 

would attack at once that you couldn't even single them out, 


distinguish them, remember them. And you simply did not have 

enough hands and feet to beat them off. 

Here, as reco~nted h-y A. Y. Susi, are several pictures from 

Krivoshchekovo (Penalty) Camp No.2 of 'Novosiblag. Life was 

lived in enormous half-dark dugouts (for five hundred each) 

which had been dug into the earth to a depth of five feet. The 

chiefs did not -interfere with the life inside -the compound-no 

slogans and no lectures. The thieves and kids held sway. Almost 

no one was taken out to work. Rations were correspondingly 

meager. On the other hand, there was a surplus of time. 

One day they were bringing a breadbox from the bread-cutting 

room under the guard of brigade members. The kids started a 

fake fight in front of. the box itself, started shoving one another, 

and tipped the box over: The brigade members hurled themselves 

on the bread ration to pick it up from the ground. o.ut of twenty 

rations they managed to save only fourteen. The "fighting" kids 

were nowhere to be seen. 

The mess hall at this camp was a plank lean-to not adequate 

for the Siberian winter. The gruel and the bread ration had to 

-be carried about 150 yards in the cold from the kitchen to the 

dugout. For the elderly invalids this was a dangerous and difficult 

operation. They pushed their bread ration far down inside their 

shirt and gripped their mess tin with freezing hands. But suddenly, 

with diabolical speed, two or three kids would attack from the 

side. They knocked one old man to the ground, six hands frisked 

him allover, and they made off like a whirlwind. His bread 

ration had been pilfered, his gruel spilled, his empty mess tin -lay 

there on the grou,nd., and the old man struggled to get to his knees .. 

(And other zeks saw this-and hastily bypassed the dangerous 

spot, hurrying to carry their own bread rations to the dugout.) 

And, tI:te weaker their victim, the more merciless were the kids. 

They openly tore the bread ration from the hands of a very weak 

old man. The old man wept and implored them to give it back 

to him: "I am dying of starvation." ','So you're going to kick the 

bucket soon anyway-what'~ the difference?" And the kids once 

decided to attack the invalids in the cold, empty building in front 

of the kitchen where there was always a mob of people. The 

gang would hurl their victim to the ground, sit on his hands, his 

legs, and his head, search, his pockets, take his makhorka and 

his money, and then disappear.

·' 


The big strong Latvian Martinson was careless enough to 

appear in the compound wearing the high brown leather bOQts of 

an English aviator which were laced over hooks up to knee 

height. He wouldn't even talce them off at night and was confident 

of his strength. But they ambushed him when he lay down for a 

brief nap on the rostrum in the mess hall. The gang swooped'" 

swiftly to the assault, and fled just as swiftly, and he was without 

his boots! All the laces had been cut BIld the boots jerked off. 

Look for them? But where? The bOOts would have been sent 

outside the compound immediately, through one of the jailers(!), 

and there sold for a high price. (And what didn't the kids "float" 

out of the compound ~o be sold! Each time the camp ~hiefs, 

taking pity on their youth, issued them even slightly better footgear 

or duds, or some flattened-out pads for mattresses that had 

been taken away from the 58's-in several days it would all have 

been traded to the free employees for makhqrka, and the kids 

would once more be going around in tatters and sleeping on 

bare boards.) _ 

It was enough for a careless free worker to go into the camp 

compound with a dog and turn his head for one second. And he 

could buy his dog's pelt that very same evening outside-the camp 

compound: the dog would have been coaxed away, knifed, 

skinned, and cooked, all in a trice. 

There is nothing finer than thievery and brigandage I They 

provide nourishment. They are jolly. But young bodies also need 

elp~ exercise, innocent enjoyment, and relaxation. If they 

er~w given hammers to nail shell boxes together, they would 

brandish them about incessantly and, with huge enjoyment (even 

the girls), hammer nails into anything that came to hand-, 

tables, walls, tree stumps. They used to be constantly fighting with 

each other-not just to knock over a breadbox, but, really 

fighting, they would pursue each other over bunks and in the 

aisles. And it didn't matter that they were stepping on legs, on 

belongings, spilling things, soiling things, waking people up, 

hurting others. They were playing! 

All children play like that, but for all ordinary children there 

are nonetheless parents (in our epoch, unfortunately, no more 

than "nonetheless"), an.!I there is some controlling force over 

them, and _ they can be stopped, they can be reached, punished. 

sent away. But in camp all that was impossible. To get through 


to the kids with words was simply impossible. Human speech 

was Qot for them. Their ears simply didn't admit anything that 

they themselves didn't need. H irritated old men started to grab 

them and pull them up short, the kids would hurl heavy objects 

at them. The kids found amuseme~t in just about anything . 

. They would grab the field shirt off an elderly invalid and play 

"Keep away"-forcing him to run back and forth jus~ as if he 

were their own age. Does he become angry and leave? Then 

he will never see it again! They will have sold it outside the 

compound for a smoke! (And they will even come up to him 

afterward innocently: "Papasha! Give us a light! Oh, come on 

now, don't be angry. Why did you leave? Why didn't you stay 

and catch it?") 

For adults, fathers and grandfathers, these boisterous games of 

the kids in the crowded conditions of camp could cause more 

anguish and be more hurtful than their robbing and their 

rapacious greed. It proved to be one of the most sensitive forms 

of humiliation for an elderly person to be made equal with a 

young whippersnapper-if only it were equal! But" not to be 

turned over to the tyranny of the whippersnappers. 

The kids' actions were unpremeditated, and they didn't mean 

to cause hurt or offense. They weren't pretending; they simply did 

not consider anyone a human being except themselves and the 

older thieves. That is how they came to perceive the world, and 

now they clung to that view. At the end of work they would 

break into a column of adult zeks who were utterly fagged out, 

hardly able to stand, sunk in a kind of trance or reverie. The 

kids would jostle the column, not because they had to be firstthis. 

meant nothing-but just for the fun of it. They used to talk 

noisily, constantly taking the name of Pushkin in vain. ("Pushkin 

took it!" "Pushkin ate itl") They used to direct obscene curses 

at God, Christ, and the Holy Virgin, and they would shout out 

all sorts of obscenity about sexual deviations and perversions, 

not even shamed by the presence of elderly women standing 

there-let alone the younger ones. 

During their short camp stay they attained the peak, the 

summit, of freedom from society! During the periods of long 

roll calls in the camp compound the ~s used to chase each 

other around, torpedoing the crowd, kno~king people into one 

another. ("Well, peasant, why were you in the way?") Or they


would run around a person,. one after the other, as they might . 

around a tree-and the person was even more useful than a tree, 

because you could shield yourself with him, jerk him, make him 

totter, tug him in different directions. 

This would have been hurtful even when you were feeling 

cheerful, but when your whole life was broken, when a man had 

been cast into the distant pit of a camp to die, when death from 

hunger already hung over you, and your vision'was darkening-:- 

it was impossible to rise above yourself and have sympathy for 

the youngsters and the fact that they could play such carefree 

games in so dismal a place. No, the tormented elderly people 

were possessed with.rage" and they used to shout at them: "Plague '. 

on you, little skunks!" "Scum!" "Mad dogs!" "Drop dead!" !'I 

could strangle them with my own hands!" "Wors~ rats than 

'the FascistS!" ''They've sent them to, kill us!" (And there was so 

much hatred in those shouts of the elderly invalids that if words 

could kill ... they would have.) Yes! And it really seemed that. 

the kids had been set on them intentionally! Because after prolonged 

thought the camp chiefs could never have invented a more 

cruel whip. (And, just as in a successful chess game all the 

combinations suddenly begin to mesh of themselves and it seems 

as if they had been brilliantly thought, out beforehand, so, too, 

a great deal s)Jcceeded in our System to the end, of wearing people 

down more effectively.) And itseems that the little de~il imps 

of Christian mythology must have been just the same as these and 

in nowise different! 

All the more so since their chief amus~ment-their constant 

symbol; their sign of greeting, and their threat-was the slingshot: 

the index and middle fingers of the hand parted in a "V" signlike 

agile, butting horns. But they were not for "butting." They 

~crew . .. for gouging. Because they were aimed always at the 

eyes. This had been borrowed from the adult thieves and indicated 

a seriously meant threat: "I'll gouge out your eyes, you 

shit!" And among the kids, too, this was a favorite game: Allof a 

sudden, like a snake's head, a "slingshot" rises' out of nowhere 

in front of im old man's eyes, ~nd the fingers move steadily toward 

\. the eyes! They are going to put them out! The old ma~ recoils. He 

is pushed in the chest just a bit, and another kid has already knelt 

on the ground right behind his legs-and the old man falls backward" 

his head banging the ground, accompanied by the gay 


laughter of the kids. And no one will ever help him up. And the 

kids don't even realize that they have 'c:lone anything bad! It was 

merely. fun! And you'd not catch those devils either, no way! 

And the old man, rising with difficulty, would whisper with rage: 

"n only I had a machine gun. I'd shoot them without pity!" 

Old man T. nourished a burning hatred for them. He used to 

say: ''Nothing good can come of them anyway. For human beings 

they are a plague. We have to annihilate them on the sly." And 

he worked out a means to this end: Whenever he succeeded in 

creeping up on a kid on the sly, he would hurl him to the ground 

and press down on the boy's chest with his knees until he could 

hear the ribs crack-but he didn't break them. He would .let 

the kid up at that point. T. used to say that the kid wouldn't 

survive an4_that there wasn't a physician who could diagnose 

what was wrong with him. And by this means T. sent several kids 

to the next world before they themselves beat him to death. 

Hate begets hate! The black water of hate flows easily and 

quickly along the horizontal. That was easier than for it to erupt 

upward thJ;ough a crater-against those who condemned both 

the old and the young to a slave's fate. 

That is how small stubborn Fascists were trained by the joint 

action of Stalinist legislation, a Gulag education, and the leayen 

of the thieves. It was impossible to invent a better method of 

. brutalizing children! It was quite impossible to find a quicker, 

stronger way of implanting all the vices of. camp in tiny, immature 

hearts. - 

-Even when it would have cost nothing to soften the heart 

of a child, the camp bosses didn't permit it. This was not the 

goal of their training. At Krivoshchekovo Camp No. 1 a boy 

asked to be transferred so that he could be with his father in 

Camp No.2. This was not permitted. (After all, the rules required 

families to be broken up.) And the boy had to hide in a 

barrel to get from one camp to the other and lived there with 

his father in secret. And in their confusion they assumed he had 

escaped and used a stick with spikes made of nails to poke about 

in the latrine pits, to see whether or not he had drowned there. 

But it is only the beginning that is hard. For Volodya Snegiryov 

at fifteen it was somehow strange to be imprisoned. But later, in 

the course of six terms, he managed to collect nearly.a century 

(including two· terms of twenty-five years eaph). He spent 

hundreds of !lays 'in punishment blocks and prisons. (There his


young lungs acquired TB.) For seven years he was on the All 

Union wanted list. After this he was well set, of course, on the 

true thieves' path. (Today he is a Group Two invalid-with0llt 

one ,lung and five ribs.) Vitya Koptyayev has been imprisoned 

continually since the age of twelve. He has been sentenced 

fourteen times, nine of them for escaping. '.'I have never yet 

lived in freedom legitimately." Yura Yermolov got work after 

his release but was fired-because it was more important to give 

the job to a demobilized soldier. And he was forced "to go on 

tour," with the end result a new-prison term. 

Stalin's immortal laws on kids existed for twenty years-until 

,the Decree of April 24, 1954, which relaXed them slightly:releasing 

those kids who had served more than one-third . . . of 

their first term! And what if there were fourteen? Twenty years, 

twenty' harvests. And twenty different age groups had been 

maimed with crime and depravity. 

So who dares cast a shadow on the memory of our Great 

Coryphaeus? 

• 

There were nimble children who managed to, catch Article 58 

very early in life. For example, Geli Pavlov got it at twelve (from 

1943 to 1949 he was imprisoned in the colony in Zakovsk). For 

Article 58, in fact, no minimum age existed! That is, what they 

said even in public lectures on jurisprudence-as, for example, 

in Tallinn in 1945. Dr. Usma knew a six-year-old boy imprisoned 

in a colony under 58. But that, evidently, is the record! . 

Sometimes the arrest of the child was put off for the sake of 

appearances, but took piace later anyway. For example, Vera 

Inchik, the daughter. of a charwoman, and two other girls, all 

aged fourteen, discovered (Yeisk, in 1932) that in the course 

of the liquidation of the "kulaks," little children were being 

thrown out to die. 'The girls ("like the revolutionaries earlier") 

decided to protest. They wrote out their protests in their own 

handwriting on sheets of paper taken from their school notebooks' 

and posted them in the marketplace themselves, expecting 

immediate and universal. indignation. A doctor's daughter, it 

would appear, was arrested immediately. But the daughter of the 

charwoman was only noted on a list. When 1937 came; she, too, 

was arrt:Sted-"for spying on behalf of Poland." 


And where, if not in this chapter, are we. going to mention 

the children orphaned by the arrest of their parent~? 

The children of the women of the religious commune near 

Khosta were fortunate. When their mothers were sent off to 

Solovki in 1929, the children were softheartedly left in their.. 

own homes and on their own farms. The children looked after 

the orchards and vegetable gardens themselves, milked their 

goats, assiduously studied at school, and sent their school grades 

to their parents on Solovki, together with assurances that they 

were prepared to suffer for God as their mothers had. (And, of 

course, the Party soon gave them this opportunity.) 

Considering the instructions to "disunite" exiled children and • 

their parents, how many of these kids must there have been even 

back in the twenties? (Remember that 48 percent.) And who 

will ever tell us of their fate? ... 

Here is . . . Galya Benediktova. Her father was a Petrograd 

typesetter, an Anarchist, and her mother was a seamstress from 

Poland. Galya remembers very 'well her sixth birthday in 1933. 

They celebra:ted it joyfully. The'next morning she woke up- 

her father and mother were gone, and some stranger in uniform 

was messing about among their books. True, a month later her 

mother returned to her; the women and children were to travel 

to Tobolsk on their own, as free people; only the men went ort a 

prisoner transport. They lived there as a family, but they had not 

managed to complete the three-year term before her mother was 

arrested again and her father was shot. Her mother died in prison 

a month later. And Galya was taken to an orphanage in a 

monastery near Tobolsk. Conditions there were such that the 

young girls lived in constant fear of violence. Then she was 

transferred to an orphanage in the city. The director talked to 

her -like this: "You are the children of enemies of the people; 

and nonetheless you are being clothed and fed!" (No! How 

• humane this dictatorship of the proletariat is!) Galya became like 

a wolf cub. At the 'age of eleven she was already given her first 

political interrogation. Subsequently she got a ten-ruble bill, 

although she did not serve it out in full. At the age of forty she 

lives a lonely life in the Arctic and writes: "My.\ife came to an 

end with my father's arrest. 1 love him so much to this very day 

that 1 am afraid even to think about it. That was a wb,ole different 

world, and my heart is sick with love for him ....'~ 

And Svetlana Sedova also remembers: "I can never forget the


day they took all our things out into the street and sat me there 

on top of them, and a heavy rain was falling. From the age of six 

I have been 'the daughter of a traitor to.the Motherland.' And 

there can be nothing more awful in life than this." 

They were taken into NKVD foster homes, into Special homes. 

The majority had their surnames changed, particularly those. who 

had famous names; (Yura Bukharin learned his real name only 

in 1956. But the Che\?otaryov name was not, it seems, par~ 

ticularly famous?) The children grew up totally purged of 

their parents' disgrace. Rosa ~ovacs, a native of Philadelphia, 

brought here as a small child by her Communist father, after 

leaving an NKVD foster home, found hs:lrself during the war in 

the American Zone of Germany-what fates b~fal people! 

and what happened? She returned to the Soviet Motherland and 

got her twenty-five years. 

Even a superficial· glance reveals one characteristic: The 

children, too, were destined for imprisonment; they, too, in .their 

turn would be sent off to the promised land of the Arcliipelago, 

sometimes even at the same time as their parents. Take the 

eightl'l-grader Nina Peregud. In November, 1941, they came to 

arrest her father. There was a search. Suddenly Nina remembered 

that inside the stove lay a crumpled but not ye~ burned humorous . 

rhyme. And it might have just stayed there, but out of nervousness 

Nina decided to tear it up at once. She reached into the 

firebox, and the dozing policeman grabbed her. And this horrible 

sacrilege, in a schoolgirl's handwriting, was revealed to the 

eyes of the ~hekists: 

The stars in heaven are shining down 

And their light falls on the dew; 

·Smolensk is already lost and gone 

And we're going to lose Moscow top. 

And she expressed the 4esire: 

We only WISh thetd bomb the school, 

We're awfully tired of studies. . 

Naturally these full-grown men engaged in saving their Motlrerland 

deep in the rear in Tambov; these knights with hot hearts 

and clean hands, had to scotch such a mortal danger.s. Nina 

. . 

3. Won't we ever someday, won't we ever, haul out at least one such mole 

who authorized the arrest of an eighth-grader because of a rhyme? To see 

what his forehead is like? And his ears? . 


was arrested. Confisca~ed for her interrogation were her diaries 

from the sixth grade and a counterrevolutionary photograph: a 

snapshot of the destroyed Vavarinskaya Church. "What did your 

father talk about?" pried the knights with the hot hearts. Nina 

only sobbed. They sentenced her to five years of imprisonment 

and three years' deprivation of civil rights (even though she 

couldn't lose them since she didn't yet have them). 

In camp, of course, she was separated from her father. The 

branch of a white lilac tree tormented her: her girl friends were 

taking their examinations! Nina suffered the way a real criminal 

was. supposed to suffer when being reformed: "What did my 

classmilte Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya do? And how foul a thing 

am I!" The security officers pushed down hard on that pedal: 

"But you can still catch up with her! Just help us!" 

Oh, you corrupters of young souls! How prosperously you are 

living out your lives! You are never going to have to stand up 

somewhere, blushing and tongue-tied, and confess what slops 

you poured over souls! 

But Zoya Leshcheva managed to outdo her whole family. And 

here is how. Her father, her mother, her grandfather, her grandmother, 

and her elder adolescent brothers had all been scattered 

to distant camps because of their faith in God. But Zoya was a 

mere ten years old. They took her to an orphanage in Ivanovo 

Province. And there she declared she would never remove the 

cross from around her neck, the cross which her mother had hung 

there when she said farewell. And she tied the knot of the cord 

tighter so they would not be able to remove it when she was 

asleep. The struggle went on and ~m for a long time. Zoya became 

enraged: "You can strangle me and then take it off a 

corpse!" Then she was sent to an orphanage for retarded children 

-because she would not submit to their training. And in that 

orphanage were the dregs, a category of kids worse than anything 

described in this chapter. The struggle for the cross went on and 

on. Zoya stood her ground. Even here she refused to learn to 

. steal or to curse. "A mother as sacred as mine must never have 

a daughter who is a criminal. I would rather be a political, like 

my whole family." 

And she became a political! And the more her instructors and 

the radio praised Stalin, the more clearly· she ·saw in him the


culprit responsible for all their misfortunes. And, refusing to give 

in to the criminals, she now began to win them over to her views! 

In the. courtyard stood one of those' mass-produced piaster 

statues of Stalin. And mocking and indecent graffiti began to 

appear on it.. (Kids love' sport! 'The important thing is to point 

them in the right directiQn.) The administration kept repainting 

the statue, kept watch over it, and reported the situation to the 

MOB. And the graffiti kept on appearing, and the kids kept on 

laughing. Finally one morning they found that the statue's head 

had been knocked off and turned upside down, and insi4e it were 

feces. 

:nus was a terrorist act! The MOB came. And began, in accordance 

with all. their rules, their interrogations and threats: 

. "Turnover the gang of terrorists to us, otherwise we are going to 

shoot the lot of you for terrorism!" (And there would have been 

nothing remarkable if they had: s9 what, i50 children shot! H 

He Himself had known about it, he would himself have given the 

order.) 

It's not known whether the kids would have st09d up to them 

or given in, but Zoya Leshcheva declared: "I did it 811 myself! 

What else is the head of that papa good for?~' 

And she was tried. And she was sentenced tq the supreme 

measure, no joke. But because of the intolerable humanitarianism 

of the 1950 law on the restoration of capital punishment the 

execution of a fourteen-year-old was forbidden. And therefore 

they gave ~er a "tenner" (it's surprising it wasn't twenty-five). 

Up to the age of eighteen she was in ordinary camp'S, and from 

.the age of eighteen on she was in Special Camps. For her directness 

and her languag.e she got a secon~ camp sentence and, it 

seems, a third one as well. 

Zoya's parents had already been freed and her brothers too,. 

but Zoya languished on in camp. 

Long live our tolerance of religion! 

Long live our children, the masters of Communism! 

ADd let any country speak up that can say it has loved its 

children as we have ours! 

Chapter 18 

• 

The Muses in Gulag 

It was an acceptecfsaying that .everything is possible in Gulag. 

The blackest foulness, any twist and turn of betrayal, wildly 

unexpected encounters, love on the ·edge of the precipice- 

eVerything was possible. But if anybody shon)d ever try to tell 

you with shining eyes that someone was re-educated by government 

means through ·the KVCh-the Cultural and Educational 

Section-you can reply with total conviction: Nonsense! 

Everyone in Gulag was re-educated-re-educated under one 

another's i!rlluence and by circumstances, re-educated in various 

.directions, 'But not even one juvenile, let alone any adult, was 

re-edutl/.t.ed by means of th~ KVCh. 

However, so mat our camps might· not be like "dens of 

depravity, communes of brigandage, nurseries of recidivists, and 

conductors of immorality" (this is how Tsarist prisons were 

described), they were equipped with such an appendage as the 

Cultural ~d Educational Section. - I "- 

Because, as was said by the then head of Gulag, I. Apeter: "To 

the prison construction of capitalist countries, the proletariat of 

the U.S.S.R; counterposes its cultural [and not .its camp!-A.S.] 

construction. Those institutions in which the proletarian state 

enforces deprivation of freedom . . . can be called prisons or 

by some other name--it is not a matter of terminology... . . 

These are places where life is not killed off but, instead, gives 

forth new shoots .... 1 . 

I don't know how Apeter ended. There is a great likelihood, I 

468 

I. Vyshinsky, op. cit., pp. 431, 429, 438.

The Muses in Gulag I 469 

think, that they soon wrung his neck, too, in th~se very places 

in which, as he said, life gives off new shoots. But it is not a 

matter of terminology. Has the reader now understood what the 

main thing was in our camps? Cultural construction. 

And for every need an organ was created, and multiplied, and 

its tentacles reached out to every island. In the twenties they 

w.ere called PVCh's-Political Educational Sections-and, from 

the thirties on, KVCh's. They were supposed. in part to replace 

the former prison priests and prison religious services. 

Here is how they were organized. The chief of the KVCh was 

a free employee with the authority of an assistant to the chief of 

camp. He picked out his own instructors (the norm was one instructor 

to 250 wards), who had to be from "strata close to the 

prQletariat," which meant, of course, that intellectuals (the petty 

bourgeoisie) were unsuitable (it was more decent for them 

to be swinging a pick), so they recruited as instructors thieves 

with two or three convictions, urban swindlers, embezzlers, and 

seducers a:Iong with them. And so it was that a young fellow who 

had kept himself sort of clean and· who had got five years for rape 

with mitigating circumstances might roll up his newspaper and 

go off to the barracks of the 58's to lead a-little discussion on 

"The Role of Labor in the Process. of Correction." The instructors 

had a particularly good outside view of that role because they 

themselves had been· "released from the productive process." 

Similar such socially friendly' elements made up the activists' 

group of the KVCh. But the activists were not released from 

work. (They could only hope that in time they would be able to 

do in one of the instructors and take over his job. This created 

a generally friendly atmosphere in the KVCh.) In the mornings 

the instructor had to see the zeks off to work; then he would 

inspect the kitchen (i.e., he would be well fed), and then he 

would go catch up on his sleep in his cabin. He would be illadvised 

to tangle with or touch the thief ringleaders because, in 

the first place, it was dangerous, and, in the second place, the 

moment would come when "criminal cohesion would be transformed 

into a productive cohesion." And at that point the thief 

ringleaders would lead the shock brigades into storm assaults. 

And so, for the time being, let them, too, just sleep it off after 

·their night-long card games. But the instructors are constantly 

guided in their activity by "the general overa:Il thesis that cultural 


and educational work in the camps is not cultural and educational 

work "with unfortUnates," but cultural and productive work with 

a knife edge (we just can't get along without that knife edge), 

directed against ... yes, you've guessed it: against the 58's. 

Alas, the KVCh "does not have the right to arrest" (now this was 

such alimitation on its cultural opportunities!) but "could make a 

request to the administration" (which would not refuse!). And, 

besides, the instructor "systematically presents reports on the 

mood of the zeks." (He who has an ear to hear, let him hear! 

At this point the Cultural and Educatiorial Section delicately 

shades into the Security Section. But this is. not spelled out in 

the instructions.) 

However, we see that, carried away by our quotations, we have 

grammatically slipped into the present tense. We have to disappoint 

the reader with the fact that the matter concerns the 

thirties, the finest, most flourishing years of the KVCh, when a 

classless society was being built in the country, and when there 

had not yet occurred1'he awful outburst of class struggle that did 

occur· the moment that society was achieved. In those glorious 

years the KVCh expanded into many important appendages: the 

cultural councils o! those deprived of freedom; cultural and 

educational commissions; sanitary and living conditions commissions; 

shock-brigade staffs; inspection posts for fulfillment of 

the production and financial plan, etc .... Well, as Comrade 

Solts (the Curator of the Belomor Canal and Chairman of the 

Commission of VTsIK on particular amnesties) said: "Even the 

prisoner in prison must live by what the whole country is living 

by." (That foul enemy of the people, Solts, was justly punished by 

proletarian justice-I beg your pardon . . . that fighter for the 

great cause, Com~ade Solts, was slandered, and perished in the 

years of the cult-oh, I beg your pardon . . . at the time of the 

insignificant phenomenon of the cult. ... ) 

And how variegated and varied were the forms of work! Like 

life itself. Organization of competition. Organization of shockworker 

movements. Struggle for fulfillment of the production 

and financial plan. Struggle for labor discipline. Storm assault on 

the liquidation of hold-ups. Cultural crusades. Voluntary collection 

of funds for airplanes. Subscription to loans. "Voluntary 

Saturdays" for strengthening the defense capabilities of the 

country. Exposure of fake shock workers. Conversations with 

malingerers. Liquidation of illiteracy (they went unwillingly).


Professional and technical courses for camp inmates from among 

the workers (the thieves pushed hard to learn to be drivers: freedom!). 

And fascinadng lectures on the inviolability of socialist 

property! And simply reading the newspapers aloud!. Evenings of 

questions .and answers. And "Red Comers" in every barracks! 

Graphs of fulfillment of plan! Statistics on goals! And what 

posters! What slogans! 

In this..bappy time the Muses soared over the-gloomy expanses 

and. chasms of the Archipelago-and the first and highest muse 

among them was PolyhyPlnia, th~ muse of hymns (and of 

slogans): 

~ts 

work~get 

. The brigade that excels ... praise and respect! 

. Do your shock time off your sentence! 

Or: 

Work liard--,-y0l1rfamily waits·for you at home! 

You see how clever this is psychologica1ly! After all, what do 

you have here? First: if you have forgotten about your family, 

this'will start you worrying about them, and remind you of !hem. 

Second: if you are intensely alarmed, it will calm you down; 

your family exists and has. not been arrested. And in the third 

place: your family does not need you just fOT your own sake, but 

needs you only through co~ientious canip work. Lastly: 

Let's join in the shock assault in honor of the seventeenth anniversary 

-of tIie October Revolutionr 

Who could r~t that? 

Then there were theatricals with politica1ly relevant themes 

(a little bit from the muse Thalia). For eXample: the servicing 

·of the Red Calendar! Or the living newspaper! Or propaganda 

mock trials! Or oratorios on the theme of the September Plenum 

of the Central Committee in 1930! Or a musical skit, "The March 

of the Articles of the Criminal Code" (Article 58 was a lame 

Baba-Yaga) I How this all brightened the life of the prisoners 

and helped them reach upward toward the light! 

And the recreation directors of the KVCh! And then the 

atheistic work too! The choirs and glee clubs (under the shade 

of the muse Euterpe). And then, those propaganda brigades: 

The shock workers swing their shoulders, 

Hurrying with their wheelbarrowsl 


39. Propaganda brigade 

40. Propaganda brigade


You see what bold self-criticism this is! They were not even 

afraid to touch on the shock workerslln fact, it was quite enough 

for II propaganda brigade (Illustration No. '39) to come t9 a 

penalty sector and give.a concert there: 

Listen, listen, River Volga! 

Night and day beside the zeks, 

On the site stand the Ch~kistsl 

What that means is: never fear; 

The workers have a strong, strong .arm, 

The OGPU men are Communistsl2 

And all the penalty workers and in particular 'the recidivists 

would throw down their playing cards and rush off to work immediately! 

. . . . . 

And there wen:, i)ther measures as well: A group of the best 

shock workers would Visit a Strict Regimen Company or a penalty 

isolator and take a propaganda brigade with them (for example, 

one like' this-in illustration No. 40). At the beginning' the 

shock workers would reproach and shame the malingerers, 

explain to them the advantages of fulfillment of the work nqrms 

(they would get better rations). And then the propaganda brigade 

would sing: 

Everywhere the battles call, 

And the Moscow-Volga Canal 

Conquers mow and cold! 

And then with total frankness: 

And so that we'll live better, 

In order to'eat, in order to drink 

We have to dig the ground better! 

And they invited all volunteers not only to return to the com- 

pound but to transfer immediately into a shock workers' barracks 

(froni the penalty barracks), .where they would be fed right on 

the spot! What an artistic' successl (The propaganda brigades, 

except fot the central one, were not released from work themselves. 

They got an extra portion of grits on the days of their 

performances.) . 

And what about more delicate types of work? For example:' 

"the struggle with the aid of the prisoners themselves against 

equalizing wages." You just have to ponder what a profoimd 

2. This was in Yagoda's day, 

474 I THE GULAGARC,HIPELAGO 

thOUght is contained here! This means that at a brigade meeting 

a prisoner would stl!-nd up and say: Don't give him a full ration; / 

he worked badly; you'd do better to give the seven ounces to me 

instead! , 

Or the comrades' courts? (In the first years after the Revolution 

these were called "moral comrades," and they embraced 

games of chance, fights, Jhefts.-but were these really. a business 

for a court? And the word ''moral'' smelled to high heaven of 

bourgeois morality, and it was abrogated. From the period of 

reconstruction [from 1928] these courts began to deal with absenteeism, 

with simulating illness, a poor attitude toward inventory, 

spoiled production, spoilage of materials. And so long 

as hostile-class elements among the prisoners did not worm their 

way into the comrades' courts [and only mUrderers, thieves converted 

to bitches, embezzlers, and bribe takers appeared there], 

thecoUJ!S in tlJ.eir sentencing would petition the camp chief for 

such penalties as deprivation of visits, food parcels, time off 

sentence, reiease on parole, and the dispatch of incorrigibles 

on prisoner transportS. What reasonable, fair measures these were, 

and how particularly useful it was that the initiative in applying 

them came from the prisoners themselves! [Though not, be 

course, without certain difficulties!] They commenced the trial 

of a former "kulak" in a comrades' court, and he said: "You' have 

a comrades' court, and to you I'm a 'kulak,' not a comrade. So 

you have no right to judge me!" They were thrown into confusion. 

They consulted the Political Education Section of the 

Chief Administration of 'Corrective Labor Camps and received 

the reply: Try him! Try him! Don't fool around!) 

What was the foundation of foundations of all the cultural 

and educational work in camp? "Don't leave the camp inmate to 

himself after work-so he will not revert to his former criminal 

tendencies." (Well, for example, so that the 58's wouldn't start 

thinking about politics.) It was important that "the prisoner 

should never get out from under the educational influences." 

And in this regard advanced modern technical devices were 

very helpful, and in particular the loudspeakers on every pillar 

and in every barracks! They must never fall silent! They must 

explain to the prisoners constantly and systematically from 

reveille until taps how to advance the hour of.freedom; they 

reported every hour on the course· of the work, on the leading 

and lagging work brigades, on those who were hindering. And


one could recommend another original format: a conversation 

on the radio with individual malingerers and slackers. 

Well, and there was the press-:of course, ·the presS! The 

sharpest weapon. of our Party. Now this was the real proof that 

in our country there was freedom of the press: the existence of 

a press in prisons! Yes! In what other coUntry was- it still possible 

for prisoners to have their own press? 

First there were handwritten wall newspapers, and second, 

mimeographed or printed ones, and in both cases they had fearless 

camp co"espondents who scourged faults (of the prisoners), 

and this self-criticism was encouraged by the Leadership, The 

extent to which the Leadership itself attributed significance to 

the free camp press is indicated even by Order 434 of Dmitlag: 

"The overwhelming majority of the criticisms arouse no response." 

The newspapers also published photos of the shock 

workers. The newspapers pointed the finger. The newspapers 

disclosed. The newspapers also exposed the sallies of the class 

enemy-so he could be hit harder. (The newspaper was the best 

collabox:ator of the Security Section!) And overall the newspapers 

reflected the flow of camp life and are invaluable testimony for 

descendants. 

Here, for example, is the newspaper of the Archangel Prison 

in 1931, and it depicts for us the bounty and prosperity in which. 

the prisoners were living: "Cuspidors, ashtrays, oilcloth on the 

tables, radio loudspeakers, portraits of the leaders, and slogans 

on the walls speaking vividly of the general Party line-these are 

the well-earned fruits which those deprived of freedom enjoy!" 

Yes, dear fruits! And how did this affect the lives of those 

deprived of freedom? The same paper half a year later: "Everyone 

has set to work energetically .... The fulfillment of the pr0- 

duction and financial plan has risen .... The.food has decreased 

and worsened."· . 

Well,that's all right! That, as it happens, is all right!. The last 

element ... could be corrected. 8 

And where, Qh, where, has all that gone? . . . Oh, how transitory 

everything beautiful and perfect is on Earth. Such an 

intensive, hearty, optimistic system of education of the merry 

. go-round type, fiowirig from the very sources of the Progressive 

Teaching, promising that. within a few years not one single crimi- 

'- 

3. So far. the materials for this chapter have been drawn from the collection 

of articles edited by .vyshinsky. op. cit •• and from Averbakh. op. cit. 


nal would be left in our country. (On November 30, 1934, it 

particularly seemed like that) * And-where then? All of a sudden 

the ice age set in (which, of course, was very necessary and 

absolutely indispensable!), and all the petals of those tender 

beginnings were scattered to the winds; And where did the shock. 

re~row movement and socialist competition disappeat to? And 

the camp newspapers? Storm assaults, collections of funds, subscriptions 

to loans, and unpaid Saturdays? Cultural councils and 

comrades' courts? Literacy drives and technical courses? What 

did it matter when they even issued orders that the portraits of 

the Party leaders and the loudspeakers should be removed from 

the camp compounds! (And they didn't go. putting any more 

cuspidors around either.) And how the life of the prisoners suddenly 

paled! How it was suddenly thrown back whole decades, 

deprived of the most important revolutionary prison gains! (But 

we are not protesting, the measures of the Party were both timely 

and very much needed.) 

No longer was the artistic-poetical form of slogans valued, and 

the slogans, too, were now only the simplest: Fulfill! Overfulfill! 

Of course, no one undertook to forbid directly aesthetic indoctrination 

or the fluttering of the muses, but the possibilities for 

this were greatly narrowed. Here, for example, is one of the camp 

compounds in VQrkuta. The nine-month winter came to an end, 

and the unreal, three-month-long, somehow pitiful summer set 

in. The chief of the KVCh was pained because the camp compound 

looked foul and dirty. In such conditions a criminal could 

not properly meditate on the perfection of the system from which 

he had excluded himself. So the KVCh proclaimed several working 

Sun4ays. In their free time the prisoners took great pleasure 

in making some ''flowerbeds''-not out of anything growing, for 

nothing would grow there, but instead of planting flowers, they 

just decorated dead mounds skillfully with mosses, lichens, 

broken glass, crushed stone, slag, and broken-up brick. And then 

around these "flowerbeds" they set up little fences made of plasterer's 

lath. Though it turned out to be not quite so beautifui as 

the Gorky Park, nonetheless the Cultural and Educational Section 

was satisfied. Were you going to say that in two mont!Js' time 

the rains would fall and wash it all away? Well; so what, they 

would wash it away. Next year we will do it all over again. 

Or what did the political chatS tum into? A lecturer came to 

Unzhlag No.5 from Sukhobezvodny (this in 1952). After work


the zeks were herded to the lecture. The comrades, it is true, had 

no secondary education, but he delivered a necessary anel topical 

lecture which was fully correct politically: "On the Struggle of 

the Greek Patriots." The zeks sat th~re sleepily, hiding behind 

each other's backs, without the slightest interest in it. The lecturer 

described the awful persecutions of the patriots and related 

how the Greek women, in tears, had written a letter to Comrade 

Stalin. The . lecture came to an end, and Sheremeta, a woman 

Q-om Lvov, who was simple-minded but cunning, rose and asked 

him: "Citizen Chief! Tell me, who should we write to?" And 

by this the positive influence of the lecture was reduced to zero. 

The types of correctional and educational work which the 

KVCh retained were these: To a prisoner's petition to the camp 

chief they would add a notation on norm fulfillment and conduct; 

they. would deliver to the vario.us rooms letters released by the 

. censor; they would bind newspapers in a file and hide them from 

the zeks so they couldn't use them for cigarette paper; three times 

a year. they gave amateur theatrical programs; they procured 

paints and canvas for artists so the latter could provide decorations 

for the camp compound and paint paintings for the chiefs' 

apartments. And then they would help the security chief a bit, 

but that was unofficial. 

After this it is not surprising that the workers of the KVCh 

themselves were not flaming,. bold leaders but for the most part 

dimwits and sad s.acks. 

Yes! There was one more important type of work which they 

did! Maintaining the boxes! They had to be opened at intervals, 

cleaned out, and locked up again-small brownish-colored boxes 

hung in a prominent place in the compound. On the boxes were 

labels: "To the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.," ''To the Council 

.of Ministers of the U.S.S.R.," ''To the Minister of Internal Affairs," 

"To the Prosecutor General." 

Go ahead and write-you have freedom of speech here. And 

we will decide what goes to whom. There are special comrades 

here to read it . 

• 

_ What is put into these boxes? Petitions asking pardon? 

Not only. Sometimes denunciations too (from beginners). 

The KVCh sorts out that they are not to go to Moscow but to 

478 THE GULAG ARCHJ.PELAGO 

the office next door. And what else? Well, the inexperienced 

reader is not gOIng to guess! There were also inventions! The 

greatest inventions, intended to turn aU modern technology upside 

down---or at any rate to liberate their inventors from camp. 

There are many more inventors-as also poets--among plaia 

ordinary people than we imagine. And in camp especially. One 

has to try to get released, fight? Invention is a form of escape 

which doesn't involve the risk of a bullet or a beating. 

At line-up before work and after, with hand barrows and picks, 

these servitors of the muse Urania (she is the closest you can 

come) wrinkle their· brows and strive to invent something to 

astound the government and fire its greed. 

Here is Lebedev, a radio. operator from the-·Khovrino Camp. 

Now that he has been turned down there is nothing more to hide, 

and he admits to me that he discovered a deviation of the compass 

needle from tJie odor of garlic. From this he had envisioned 

a way to modulate high-frequency waves with an odor and 

thereby transmit an odor over a great distance. However, government 

circles did not see any military advantage in this project 

and were not interested. That meant it didn't come off. Either 

go on bending your back or think up something better! 

One or another fellow-true, very rarely-would be suddenly 

taken off somewhere. He would not explain or say anything himseH, 

so as not to spoil things, and no one in the camp could figure 

out whyt~articular person had been taken off somewhere. 

One might disappear forever, and another might be brought back 

after a time. He would still not say what it was about, so as not 

to become a laughingstock. Or he would put on an air of great 

mystery. This, too, was tYPipal of the zeks: telling something to 

exaggerate their importance. 

But having myseHbeen on the Islands of Paradise, I had had 

the opportunity of seeing both ends of the pipeline: where this 

got to and how they read things there. And here I am going to 

allow myseH to amuse the patient reader of this not-so-verycheery 

book. . . 

There was a certain TrushIyakov, formerly a Soviet lieutenant, 

sheD-shocked in Sevastopol, taken-prisoner there, dragged subsequently 

through Auschwitz, and as a result of all this a_ little 

to.uched. He managed to propose from camp something so intriguing 

that it led to his oeing brought to a sCientific research

~sreyal 

The Muses in Gulag I ,479 

institute' for prisoners--i.e., a sharashka. There he proved to be 

a genuine fountain of inventions, and no sooner-had the chiefs 

rejected one of them than he immediately proposed the next. 

And even though he did not get even one of· these inventions to 

.the calculating stage, he was so Qispir&t, so impressive, spoke 

so little, and had such an expressive look, that not only did no 

one dare suspect him of swindling, but one of my friends, a very 

serious engineer, insisted that in the profundity of his ide!lS 

Tt:Ushlyakov was the twentieth-century Newton. I, it is true, did 

not follow up on all his ideas to the very end, but he was entrusted 

with working out and.preparing a rodar absorber which he himself 

had prpposed. He demanded help in higher mathematics, 

and, as a mathematician, -I was assigned to him. Here is how 

Trushlyakov set forth his idea: 

In order· not to reflect radw; waves, a plane or a timk must 

. be covered with a certain material made up of many separate 

layers. (What sort of material this was Trushlyakov never told 

me; either he had not yet selected i,t or else this was the inventor's 

main secre~.) The electromagnetic wave had to lose all its energy 

through the multiple refractions and reflections back and forth 

at the edges of these lay~. And now, without knowing the characteristics 

of ~e material, yet making use of the laws of geo-. 

metrical optics and any other means a ... ailable to me, I was 

suppOsed to prove that everything would work out as Trushlyakov 

had predicted-and in addition select the optimal number of 

Naturally, I could do nothing! Nor did Trushlyakov do anything 

either. Our creative alliance collapsed. 

_ 

Soon afterward, Trushlyakov brought· me in my capacity as 

librarian (I was also horarian there) a requisition for an interlibrary 

loan from the Lenin Library. Without indicating authors 

or publications, the requisition consisted of the followbig: "Something 

relating to the technology of interplanetary travel" 

Smce we were only in the year 1947. at the time, the Lenin 

Library had almost nothing to offer him other than Jules Verne. 

(People thought little of Tsiolkovsky at that time.) After an 

unsuccessful attempt to setup a flight to the Moon, Trushlyakov - 

was expelled thence into the abyss-back to camp. r--- 

But the letters kept coming and coming. 1 was subsequently 

attached (this time as a translator) to a group of engineers in- 

480 '\ THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

vestigating the piles of claims to inventions and patents com~g 

in from the camps. A translator was required because many of 

the documents arriving in 1946 and 1947 were in German. 

But .these were not claims to patents! And they were not 

voluntary compositions either! It was shameful and painful to 

read them. They had been extorted, exacted, sweated out of 

German war prisoners. For it was clear that we could not succeed 

iIi holding these prisoners as war prisoners for all eternity. It 

might be thtee years or it might be five after the end of the war, 

but sooner or later they would have to be released "nach der 

Heimat." It was therefore necessary during the years they were 

here to squeeze out everything which could be useful to our 

country. We had to try to get even this pale reflection of those 

German patents that had been carted off to the Western zones. 

I could easily picture how it had been done. The unsuspecting 

and dependable Germans were instructed to report their fields 

of specialization, where they had worked, and in what capacity. 

Then, naturally, the Security Operations Third Section summoned 

all the engineers and technicians into their office one at 

a time. They were first questioned with respectful attention (this 

flattered the Germans!) about the kind and nature of their prewar 

work in Germany. (They had already begun to think that 

perhaps they would be given more privileged work instead of 

camp work.) Then a signed agreement on nondisclosure was 

required of them. (And once something is "verboten" to a German 

he will not violate it.) And, finally, they were confronted 

with a harsh demand to set forth in writing all the interesting 

details of their field of production and describe any important 

technical innovations used there. Then the Germans came to 

realize belatedly what kind of trap they had been caught in by 

bragging about their former jobs! But they could not just write 

nothing at all now-for they were threatened in that ·event with 

never being allowed to return to their Motherland. (And in those 

years this seemed quite likely.) 

With tormented consciences, depressed, barely pushing their 

pens, the Germans wrote. . . . The only thing that saved them 

and enabled them to avoid giving away serious secrets was the 

fact that the ignorant Security officers were incapable of fathoming 

the true nature of their testimony and valued it according to 

the number of pages. And we, going through it, were hardly ever


able to find anything substantial; the information was either 

contradictory or buried in a scientific fog with omission of the 

main thing, or else tlIey seriously described "technical innovations" 

of a type well known to our grandfathers. 

But the claims to patents in Russian--,what servility they sometimes 

reeked of! Once again one can easily picture how th~ 

were written: how there in camp, on a pitiful free Sunday, the 

authors of these claims carefully hid what they were writing from 

their neighbors, probably'lying and saying they were. wri.ting 

petitions for pardon. Nor could their dhn minds foresee that it 

was not the lazy, well-fed Leadership that would read their calligraphy 

addressed to the Sovereign, but plain ordinary zeks like 

themselves. 

And we leafed through sixteen big pages (paper begged from 

the KVCh) of the most detailed proposals: (1) "On the use of 

irifrared rays for guarding camp compounds." (2) ''On the use 

of photoelectric elements for counting the number of 'prisoners 

departing through the gatehouse." And the son-of-a-bitch included 

drawings too, and technical elucidations. And the preamble 

was as follows: 

Dear Iosif Vissarionovicb! 

Even though I bave been sentenced for my crimes under Article 

58 to a long term of imprisonment, even bere "I remain devoted to 

my beloved Soviet government and wisb to assist in the'secure guarding 

of the fierce enemies of the people wbo surround me. If I am 

summoned from the camp and receive the necessary means" I 

'guarantee to make this system work. 

Now this was a "political" for you! This treatise went from 

hand to hand among us, amid exclamations and obscenities (all 

of us there were zeks). One of us sat down to write a review of 

the project: The project was technically 'illiterate ... the project 

did not take into consideration . . . the project did not provide 

for ... unprofitable ... unreliable ... it ,could lead to a weakening 

rather than a strengtbening of camp guard .... 

What are you dreaming of today, Judas, at your distant camp? 

I'll shove a pole down your throat. Drop dead, rat! . 

And here came a packet from Vorkuta. The author complains 

that the Americans have an atomic bomb and our Motherland 

hasn't. He writes that at Vorkuta he often ponders this fact, and 

that up there, behind barbed wire, he wishes to help the Party and 


the government. And therefore he heads his project: ''DAN 

Disintegrating the Atomic Nucleus." But he has not perfected 

this project (a familiar picture) because of the lack of technical 

literature at the Vorkuta Camp. (As if there were any other 

literature there either!) And this savage merely asks us to send 

him in the meantime instructions on radioactive disintegration, 

after which he will undertake to complete his project for DAN. 

Behind our desks we roll with laughter and almost simultaneously 

come to the same vulgar evaluation: 

This here DAN 

Is a --ing sham. 

And meanwhile really great scientists were done in and perished 

in camps. But the Leadership of our dear Ministry was in 

no hurry to seek them out there and to find worthier uses for them. 

Aleksandr Leonidovich Chizhevsky served his whole term 

without ever being in a sharashka. Even before camp Chizhevsky 

was very much out of fallor in our country because he had found 

a Connection between revolutions on earth, biological processes 

on earth, and solar activity. His scientific scope was out of the 

ordinary: the problems he concerned himself with were unexpected 

and did not fit into the cQnvenient, accepted classifications 

of ··'.e world of science; and it was not clear how they could be put 

to use for Inilitary and industrial purposes. Today, after his death, 

we read articles praising him: He established that the incidence 

of myocardiac thrombosis is sixteen times greater during electrical 

storms. He correctly predicted flu epideInics. He was in quest 

of a technique for the early discovery of cancer based on the 

graph of the subsidence reaction of red corpuscles. And he advanced 

the hypothesis of zeta radiation from the sun. 

The father of Soviet space navigation, Korolev, was, to be sure, 

taken into a sharashka, but as an aviation scientist. The sharashka 

adIninistration did not allow him to work on rockets, and he 

had to do that work at night. 

(We don't know whether L. Landau would have been taken 

into a sharashka or shipped off to distant islands. He had already 

confessed, with a broken rib, to being a German spy, but was 

saved by the intervention of P. Kapitsa.) - 

Konstantin Ivanovich Strakhovich, the great Russian specialist 

in aerodyDamics and an extraordinarily versatile scientific Inind,


after traveling on a prisoner transport from the Leningrad prison, 

became ~ auxiliary worker in the bath of the Uglich Camp. He . 

now relates the whole story with his innocent childish laugh, which 

he amazingly retained throughout his whole tenner. After several 

months in a death cell, he then survived a serious attack of dystrophic 

diarrhea in camp. After that they assigned him to guard 

the entrance to the soaping room when the women's brigades 

were taking baths. (Thei had to assign stronger people to. deal 

with the men-he couldn't have handled it.) His task was to be 

sure that the women entering the soaping room wore nothing and 

had empty hands, so that everything went to the fumigator, most 

of all the bras and panties, which the Medical Section considered 

the chief centers of lice infestation, and which the women tried 

particularly hard not to tum in and attempted to take throughthe 

bath with them. And Strakhovich looked like this: he had a 

Lord Kelvin beard and a forehead like a craggy cliff, with a brow 

double the ordinary height-you could hardly call it a forehead . 

at all. The women pleaded with him and insulted him and grew 

angry at him and laughed at him and invited him to accompany 

them to a pile of twig brooms in the comer-nothing moved him 

and he was merciless. Then they unanimously and maliciously 

nicknamed him "The Impotent." And suddenly one fine day the 

authorities came and took this "Impotent" off to be in charge 

of no more and no less than the first turbojet engine project in 

the country. 

But of those scientists who were allowed to die at general work 

we know nothing .... 

And as for those arrested and destroyed in the heat of scientific 

discovery (like Nikolai Mikhailovich Orlov, who back in 

1936 had worked out a method for the long-term preservation of 

foodstuffs), how are we to find out about them? After all, their 

discoveries were shut down following the arrest of the men who 

made them. . 

• 

. In the fetid, oxygenless atmosphere of the camps, the sooty flame 

of the KVCh would sputter· and flare up, casting the merest 

glimmer. But people wo.uld be· drawn from various barracks 

and from various brigades even to this little flame. Som" came 


with a direct purpose: to tear paper from a book or newspaper 

to make a smoke, to get paper for a petition, or to write with 

the ink there. (Ink was not permitted in the barracks, and here; 

too, it was kept under lock. and key; after all, ink can be used 

to forge rubber stampsI-) And some came ... just to-put on airs: 

See how cultured I am! And some ... to rub elbows and chatter 

with new people, someone other than their boring fellow brigade 

mates. And some came. . . to listen to the others and report to 

the "godfather." But there were others still who didn~t themselves 

know why they were inexplicably drawn there for a short evening 

half-hour, tired as they were, instead of lying on their bunks, 

allowing their aching bodieS to rest a littlo. 

These visits to the -:KVCh brought the soul a mite of refreshment 

in imperceptible and unobvious ways. Even though those 

who stopped by were ~together the same sort of hungry zeks 

as the ones who stayed sitting on their brigade multiple bunks, 

here they didn't talk about rations, nor of portions of cereal, 

nor about norms. People here didn't talk about the things that 

made up camp life, and therein lay a protest of the heart and 

some relaxation for the mind. Here they talked about some kind 

of fabulous past which just could not have existed for these gray, 

famished, bedraggled people. Here, too, they talked about the 

iDdescribably blessed, free-moving life out in freedom of those 

fortunates who had somehow succeeded in not landing in prison. 

And people also talked about art here, sometimes so magically! 

It was as if someone, when.an evil spirit was raging, had drawn 

on the ground a weakly gleaming and foggily flickering circleand 

it was just about to go out, but as long as it hadn't you could 

at least imagine that within that circle, for those half-hours, you 

were not in the power of the evil force. 

Yes, and then, too, someone would sometimes be plucking at 

a guitar. Someone would be softly singing--a song that was not 

at all the kind permitted on the stage. And something would stir 

within you: Life ... exists! It exists! And, looking happily around 

you, you, too, would want to express something to someone. 

However, speak only guardedly! Listen, but keep pinching 

yourself. Take Lyova G--n. He was an inventor (and a student 

who had not completed the course in the auto engineering 

institute; be was planning to increase the efficiency of motors, 

but they took all his notes away when they 'seJlfched his place).

~irlp8 

T..he Muses in Gulag I 485 

He was also an actor and we were putting on Chekhov's The 

Proposal with him. He was a philosopher too, and was adept at 

such cute expressions as "I don't want to worry about future 

generations. Lettbem scratch around in the earth for themselves. 

1 myself cling to life just like this!" He demonstrated by gripping 

the wood of the table with his fingernails. "Believe in lofty ideas? 

That's something to be said into a telephone with the wire pulled 

out. History is a disconnected chain of facts. Give me back my 

tail! An amoeba is more perfect than a human being: it has 

simpler functions." If you listened to him, he would explain in 

detail why he hated Lev Tolstoi, why he was intoxicated by 

llya Ehrenburg and Aleksandr Grin. He was also an obliging 

chap who didn't avoid hard work: he would hammer away at a 

wall with a cold chisel, true, in a brigade guaranteed 140 percent 

of norm. His father had been arrested and had died in 1937, but 

he him~lf was a nonpolitical offender imprisoned for forging 

bread-ration cards. However, he was ashamed of his own swindling 

article and tried to get closer to the 58's. He tried and tried 

to get closer. But then one day some camp trials began and this 

oh, so pleasant and interesting lad, "clinging to life," Lyova 

G-n, testified as a witness for the prosecution. 4 And it was 

a good thing if you hadn't said too much to him. 

If there were eccentrics iIi camp (and there always were!), 

they could not avoid dropping in on the KVCh. They were bound 

to look in. 

Take Aristid Ivanovich Dovatur-a real eccentric for you. 

A native of St. Petersburg, of French and Rumanian extraction, 

a classical philologist, for all the,past and future a bachelor and 

a solitary. He was tom away from Herodotus and Caesar, like a 

cat from meat, and imprisoned in a camp. His heart was still full 

of unexpounded texts. And in camp he acted as if he were in a 

dream; He would have been finished off in the first week, but 

the doctors provided him with protection and set him up in the 

enviable position of medical statistician; and in addition, not 

without benefit to the freshly recruited camp medical assistants, 

Dovatur was instructed to give lectures twice a month! This was 

in camp-and they were in Latin! Aristid Ivanovich stood at a 

4. And aU those who "cling to life" too hard never particularly cling to the 


small blackboard-and glowed, just as in his best university 

years! He· wrote down strange columns of conjugations which 

had never ever loomed·before the ey~ of the natives, and at the 

sound of the crumbling chalk his heart beat voluptuously. His life 

was so quiet and so well set up! But disaster crashed on his head 

too: the camp chief considered him a rarity-an honest person! 

And he named him ... manager of the bakery-the most lucra- 

· tive of all camp positions! The man in charge of bt:ead was in 

charge of men's lives I The road to this position was paved with 

the bodies and the souls of camp inmates-but few got there. 

And then and there this position fell from the heavens-to 

Dovatur, who was crushed by it. For one week he went about 

like a person condemned to death, even before taking over the 

bakery. He begged the camp chief to have mercy on him and to 

allow him 'to live, to keep his Latin conjugations and an uftconfined 

spirit. And pardon came: a routine crook was named manager 

of the bakery. 

And here is another eccentric who was always in the KVCh 

after work. Where else would he be? He had a big head and large 

· features suitable for theatrical makeup, easily visible from far 

away. He had particularly expressive bushy eyebrows. Arid his 

look was always tragic. From a comer of the room he looked in 

dispiritedly on our skimpy rehearsals. This was Camille. Leopoldovich 

Gontoir. In the first years after the Revolution he had 

come from Belgium to Petrograd to create a New Theater, a 

theater of the future. Who then could have foreseen how this 

future would go and that theater directors would be arrested? 

Gontoir fought both world 'wars against the Germans, the first 

in the West and the second in the East .. A.nd now he had been 

pasted with a tenner for treason to the Motherland. Which one? 

And when? 

. - But of course the most noticeable people in the KVCh were 

the artists. They were the head men there. If there was a separate 

room, it waS for them. If anyone was permanently released from 

general work, it was invariably they. Of all the servitors of the 

muses only they created real values-values you could feel with 

the fingers, hang up in ap!U1lllents, sell fbr money. They did not, 

of course, paint their pictures out of their own inspiration. No 

· one asked that of them, for how could a good painting come out 

of the head of a 58? They simply painted big copies from post-


cards. Some of them with a system of small squares and some 

without. And you couldn't find a finer piece of, aesthetic merchandise 

in the entire taiga and tundra backwood: Just go ahead 

and paint, and we'll kno~ where to hAng it. Even if we don't like 

it right away. Vypirailo, the assistant commander of the platoon 

of guards, would come in and look at a copy of Nero the Victor 

by Deul: 

"What d'ya call that? That a bridegroom there? Why is he 

so dark?" 

But he would take it all the same. The artists also painted rugs 

with lovely ladies floating about in gondolas, with swans, sunsets, 

and castles--and all of it was very much in demand among the 

comrade officers. And not being fools, the artists also painted 

the same kind of rugs on their own, and the jailers sold them on 

the sly in,the markets outside. They were in big demand. On the 

whole, the artists could make out in, camp. . 

, Sculptors had it worse. Sculpture for MVD personnel was 

, something not pretty enough, not familiar enough" to be put in 

their homes-yes, and it took up room for furniture, and if you 

knocked it over, it would break. It was rare for sculptors to have 

work in camp, and when they did, it was usually combined with 

painting, as with Nedov. Even then Major Bakayev would walk • 

in and see a statuette of a mother: 

"Why did you make a weeping mother? In our country mothers 

don't weep!" And ~e reached out to break up the figure. 

Volodya Klempner, a young-composer, son, of a well-to-do 

lawyer, and in terms of camp concepts still an unbeaten newcomer, 

took his own piano from home to the Beskudinovo Camp 

,near Moscow. (This was unheard of in the Archipelago!) AIlegecUy 

he took it to strengthen mass cultural work, but in reality 

to continue his own /::omposing. And he always had the key to 

the camp stage, and after taps he would play there by candlelight 

(the electricity ,had been shut off). Once he was playing there 

like that, writing down his new sonata, when he jumped ata voice 

behind him: 

"It's sh-ack-Ies yoUr music smells of!" 

,Klempner jumped up. From the wall where he had stood concealed, 

a majpr, the camp 'chief, an old Chekist, advanced'on the 

candle-andbehind him his immense black shadow grew. Now 

the major. understood why this deceiver had sent for his piano. 


He came up, took the music Klempner had written, and silently _ 

and gloomily began to bum it with the candle. 

"What are you doing?" the young composer could not help 

but cry out. 

'. 

"Shove your music!" the major declared still more positively 

through clenched teeth. 

The ashes floated from the sheet and fell softly on the keyboard 

. 

. The old Chekist had made no mistake: that sonata really was 

written about the campS.5 . 

If a poet announced himself in camp, he would be allowed to 

write captions beneath caricatures of prisoners and to compose 

jingles-also about violators of discipline. 

No other theme was permitted eithe~ a poet or a composer. 

They were unable to make the camp chiefs anything tangible, 

useful, to be held in the hands. 

And there were just no prose-writers in camp because there 

were not supposed to be, ever. - 

When Russian prose departed.for the camps; wrote B. Slutsky, 

it departed! And it never returned. It departed! And never 

emerged. - - 

We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the 

',-full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of 

the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us 

about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner 

transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes 

carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen 

mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be 

remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. 

But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder 

for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with 

paper, to. pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago. Who 

in camp could make up his mind to write? A. Belinkov wrote, 

and h.is writings got to the "godfather"-and on the ricochet he 

got twenty-five years. There was M. I. Kalinina, no writer at all, 

5. Soon they found an excuse to pin a new camp case on Volodya and sent 

him til the Butyrki for interrogation. He never returned to his camp, and his 

piano, of course, was never returned either. And did he survive himself? I do 

not know, but there is somehow no word of him.


who nonetheless wrote down in her notebook what was notable' 

in camp life: "Perhaps it will be useful to someone someday." 

But it got to the secllrity officer. And she was put in a punishment 

block. (But she got off easily.) Here is Vladimir Sergeyevich 

G-v, who, since he was not under convoy, while he was 

outside the camp compound, wrote over a period of four months 

somewhere there a chronicle of the camp, and in a dangerous 

moment he burjed it in the ground, and he was sent away forever .. 

and it remained in the ground. So inside the camp compound 

it was impossible, 'and outside the camp compound it was inipossible, 

So where was it possible? Only in your head. But only 

verse can be written that way, prose can't. 

It is iInpo~ible to estimate by extrapolating from the few who 

survived how many of us senritors of Clio and Calliope perished 

-because we, too, had no likelihood Qf surviving. (Going back 

over my own camp life, for example, I see that I was ceI!ain to 

die in the Archipelago--or else so to adapt myself in order to 

survive that even the need to write would have died. I was saved 

by a secondary factor, mathematics. And how 'could you 

take that into account in your calculations?) , 

" Pr,om the thirties on, everything that is called our prose is 

merely the foam from a lake which has vanished under~ound. 

It is foam and not prose because it detached itself from everything 

that was fundamental in those decades. The best of the 

writers suppressed the best within themselves and turned their 

back on truth-and only that way did they and their books survive. 

And those who could not renounce profundity, individuality, 

and directness ... inevitably had to lay down their heads during 

those decades, most often through camp, though some lost 

theirs through reckless courage at the front. .. , 

That's how our prose philosophers went beneath the ground. 

Our prose historians too. Our lyrical prose writers. Our prose 

impressionists. Our prose humorists. 

And yet at the same time the Archipelago provided a unique, 

exceptional opportunity for our literature, and perhaps ... even 

for world literature. This unbelievable serfdom in the full 1l0wer 

of the twentieth century, in this one and only and not at allredeeming 

sense, opened to wrlters a fertile though fatal path.8 

, , , 

6. I will be so bold as to elucidate this thought in its mOst general aspect. 

As long as the world has stood. there have always been until now tw,o unmix- 

490 THE GUJ:.AG ARCHIPELAGO 

Millions of Russian intellectuals were thrown there-not for 

a joy ride: to be mutilated, to die, without any hope of return. 

For the first time in history, such a multitude of sophisticated, 

mature, and cultivated people found themselves, not in imagination 

and once and for all, inside the pelt of slave, serf, logger, 

miner. And so for the first time in world history (on such a scale) 

the experience of the upper and the lower strata of society 

merged. Thai extremely important, seemingly transparent, yet 

able strata of society: the upper and the lower, the ruling and the ruled. This 

is a crude division, like all divisions, but if one classifies among the upper 

stratum not only those superior in power, money, and social position but also 

those superior in education, obtained through either family efforb or their own, 

in a word all those w1!.o do not need to work with their hands, then the division 

will be almost across the board. 

Therefore· we can expec:l four spheres of world literature (and of art in 

general, and ideas in general). The first sphere: those.in the upper stratum 

Il0rtraying (desc:ribing, pondering) the upper stratum, in other words themselves, 

their own people. The second· sphere: the upper stratum depicting or 

pondering the lower stratum, "the younger brother." The third sphere: the 

lower stratum depic:ting the upper. And the fourth: the lower portraying .•• 

the lower, i.e., itself. . 

The upper stratum always had the free times, an excel!S or at least a sufficiency 

of means, the education,· the training. Those among them who wanted 

to could always master the artistic techniques and ,the discipline of thought. 

But there is one important law of life: Contentment always kills spiritual striving 

in a human being. And as a result this first spnere contained within· it many 

satiated artistic diStortions and many morbid and self-important "schools" 

sterile flowerings. And only when writers who were either profoundly unhappy 

in their personal lives or had an overwhelming, natural drive toward spiritual 

seeking entered t1)at sphere as the bearers of culture was great literature c~ted. 

The fourth sphere is all the world's folklore. Leisure time here was br.oken 

up into tiny piec:es-and was available to individuals in different ways. And 

the anonymous contributions to this culture also came in different ways.-unpremeditated, 

through lucky moments of glimpsing a perfected image or tum 

of speech. But the actual creators of it were innumerable, and they were almost. 

always oppressed and dissatisfied people. Everything created then passed 

through selec:tion, washing, and polishing a hundred thousand times over, passing 

from mouth to mouth and year to year. And that is how we have come to 

possess our golden store of ,folklore. It is never empty or soulless--because 

, among its authors there, were none who were unacquainted with sufferinR. The 

written literature belonging to the fourth sphere ("proletarian," ''peasant'') is 

altogether embryonic, inexperienced, unsucc:essful, because individual knowhow 

has always been lacking here. . ' 

The written literature of the third sphere ("looking upward from below") 

suffered from the same faults of inexperience, but even worse: it was poisoned 

by envy and hate-sterile feelings which do not create art. It made the same 

mi&take'that revolutionaries continually make: ascribing the vices of the upper 

class to the class itself and not to humanity as a whole, while failing to imagine 

how notably they themselves inherit these vices. Or else, on the other hand, it 

was spoiled by servile fawning. . 

Morally, the second sphere of literature promised to be the most fertile

Tire Muses in Gulag I 491 

previously impenetrable partition prev.enting the upper strata'- 

from understanding the lower-pity....."...now melted. Pity -had 

dev~m the noble sympathizers of the past (all· the enlightenersl) 

-and pity had also blinded them! They were tormented by pangs 

of conscience because they themselves did not share that evil fate; 

and for that reason they considered themselves obliged to shout 

thiee times as loud about injustices, at the BaDle time missing out 

on.any fundamental examination of the human nature of the pe0- 

ple of the lower strata, of the upper strata, of all people. 

Only from the intellectual zeb of the Archipelago did these 

pangs of conscience drop away once and for all, for they cOmp1etely 

shared.the evil fate of the people! Only now could an 

educated Russian write about an enserfed peasant from the inside 

-because he himself had become a serf. . 

But at this point he had no pencil, no paper, no time, no 

supple fingers. Now the. jailers kept shaking out his things and 

looking into the entrance and exit of his alimentary canal, and 

the security officers kept looking into his eyes. 

The experience of the upper and the lower strata had mergedbut 

the bearers of the merged experience perished .... 

And thus it was that an unprecedented philosophy and literature 

were buried under the iron crust uf the Archipelago • 

• 

But the most populous of all the groups that visited the KVCh 

... were the particjpants in amateur theatricals. This particular 

function-directing· amateur theatricaIs--,;till belonged to the 

("looking dowh from above"). It was created by· people whOse goodness, striv· 

ing for the truth, and sense of justice had proved stronger than their soporific 

prosperity, and whose artistry was at the same tilDe mature and on a high IeVe1. 

But the fault of this sphere was the Incapacity genuinely to understand. These 

authors sympathized, pitied, wept, were indignant-and precisely becauSe of 

this Could not understand precisely. They always looked at things from the 

........ sidelines and from above. They simply could ·oot climb into the pelts of the 

members of the lower stratum. And any who managed to get one leg over the 

fence could never get the other over. 

Evidently man's nature is· so egocentric that this transformation can only 

take place, alas, with the help of external violence. That is how Cervantes got 

his education in slavery and Dostoyevsky his. at hard labor. In the· Gulag 

Archipelago this experiment was carried out on millions of heads and hearts 

all at once. 


aged and decrepit KVCh, just as it had when it was young and 

vigorous. T On individual islands of the Archipelago amateur 

~irtaeht rose and disappeared in alternating ebb and flow, but 

unlike the tides of the sea, this did not take place with regularity 

but in fits and starts for reasons known to the chiefs but not to 

the zeks, and perhaps because the chief of the KVCh had to make 

a mark in his report once every six months, and perhaps because 

they were expecting someone from up top. " 

Here is how it was done at the remote camps: The chief of 

the KVCh (who was never ordinarily seen in the camp compound 

anyway, everything being managed for him, by a prisoner 

instructor) would SUDlIDon an accordionist and tell him: "Here's 

what! ~ound up a choir!~ And see to it that it performs in a 

month's time." 

"But, Citizen Chief, I don't read notes." 

"What the hell do you need with notes! You just play a song 

everyone knows, and let the rest sing along." 

And so the recruiting of a choir was announced, sometimes 

along With a dramatics group. Where were they going to practice? 

The KVCh room was too small for this, they needed a more 

spacious one, and, of course, there was no clubroom at all. 

Ordinarily the usual domain for this was the camp mess'hallsconstantly 

stinking with the steam from SJ;Uel, the odor of rotten 

vegetables and boiled cod. On one side of the mess halls was the 

kitchen, and on the other side either a permanent stage or a temporary 

platform. After dinner the choir and the dramatic circle 

assembled here. (The surroundings were like those in the drawing 

by A. G-,-n. [lliustration No. 41.] Except that the artist has 

depicted not their own local amateur stage group but a touring 

"culture brigade." The last dishes are about to be gathered up 

7. The universal concern for am~teur theatricals in our country, something 

on which, incidentally, no small amounts of money are spent, does have 

some sort of intent, but what? One cannot say immediately. Is it the inertia 

left over froin what was once proclaimed in the twenties? Or is it, like sport, 

an obligatory means of distracting the people's energy and interest? Or does 

someone believe that all these songs and skits actually help the requir'ed proceasing 

of feelings? 

. 8. The political leadership both in the army and out in freedom has a superstitious 

faith in the primary indoctrinational significance of,choirs in particular. 

All the rest of the amateur theatrical activity could wither, but there has to be 

II choirl A singing collective. Songs could easily be checked out, they were all 

ours/ And whatever you sing . • • yciu believe.

41. Amateur theatricals 

-The Muses in Gulag I 493 

and the last-Ieggers are about to be kicked out-and then the 

audience will be let in. The reader can see how cheerful the serf 

actresses are.) 

How was one to coax the zeks to join in the amateur theatricals? 

For out of perhaps five hundred prisoners in the compound 

there might be three or four genuine amateur singers-so how 

was one to put together a choir? Well, the main bait in-mixed 

camp compounds lay in encounters at the choir! (Let's take a 

look again at Illustration No. 39. Well, isn't it clear why they are 

all in the KVCh?) A. Susi, who had been appointed choirmaster, 

was astonished at how rapidly his choir grew, so much so that he 

could never fully rehearse them in any single song. New participants 

kept coming and coming. They had no voices. They had 

never sung before. But they kept begging, and how cruel it would 

have been to refuse them, to ignore their newly awakened thirst 

for art! However, many fewer choir members turned up at the 

-actual rehearsals. (The reason was that the participants in the 

amateur theatricals were permitted to move about the compound, 

to and from rehearsals, for two hours after the bed curfew. And 

so they used these two hours to wind up their own affairs.) 

And it was not unheard of for things like this to happen: Just 

494 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. 

before the performance the only bass in the choir would be sent 

off on a prisoner transport (the transports were handled by a different 

department than the performance). Or the choirmasterthe 

~ame Susi-was' summoned by the chief of the KVCh and 

told: 

"We very much appreciate that you have worked so hard, but 

we can't let you perform at the c~)Qcert, ,because a 58 doesn't 

· have the right tolead a choir. So get a replaceQlent ready; waving 

your arms around isn't like having a voice-you'll find someone." 

. . 

And there were those for whom the choir and the dramatic 

circle were not merely a place to me~ someone-but rather a 

· counterfeit of life, or maybe not a counterfeit, but a reminder, 

instead, that life despite everything still exists, that it does go on 

exiSting. From the warehouse they would one day bring rough 

brown Wrapping paper from cereal sackS-and_ it was handed 

round to write parts on. A time-honored theatrical procedure! 

And then, too, there was the distribution of roles! And the consideration 

of who would be kissing whom in the play! Who would 

be dressed in what! How to make up! How interesting it would 

look! -On the night of the performance one could take a real 

mirror in one's hand and see oneself in a real dress from freedom 

and with rouged cheeks. 

It was very interesting to dream about all that, but good Lord, 

· the .plays! What kind of plays they had there! Those special collections, 

inscribed "For Use Only lnsid,e Gulag!" Why ... "only"? 

Not "both for freedom and also for Gulag," but instead . . . 

"only inside Gulag." What this really.meant was that it was such 

twaddle, such pigs' swill, that out in freedom they wouldn't 

swallow it, so pour it out for us! The stupidest and least talented 

writers deposited their most loathsome and rubbishy plays here! 

And if anyone wanted to put on a farce by Chekhov or s!)mething 

else, where was he supposed to find. that play? It could not be 

found even among the free people in the whole settlement, and 

what the camp library had was Gorky, and even then pages had 

been tom out to roll smokes. 

N. Davidenkov, a writer, assembled a dramatic circle in the 

Krivoshchekovo Camp. From somewhere he got an unusual playlet: 

it was patriotic and dealt with Napoleon's sojourn in Moscow! 

(And probably it was on a level with Rastopchin's' posted


proclamations!)· They distributed the roles,. and the prisoners 

rushed to rehearsals with great enthusiasm. So what could interfere 

now? The main role was played by Zina, a former teacher, 

arrested after remaining behind in occupied territory. She acted 

well, and the director was satisfied with her. All of a sudden 

there was a quarrel at one of the rehearsals: the rest of the 

women rebelled against Zina's playing the main role. This was 

not exactly a new situation, and it was one with which a director 

can ordinarily cope. But h~re's what the women were shouting: 

''It's a patriotic role, and she - Gemlans on occupied territory! 

Get out, bitch! Get out, you German whorel .Before you 

get stomped!" These women were socially friendly and also per~ 

haps from among the 58's, but not on a charge of treason. Did 

they think: this up themselves, or did the Third Section suggest it 

to them? The director, in view of his article, was·in no positiqn to 

defend his actresS. So Zina departed sobbing. 

Does the reader sympathize with the director? Does the reader 

think: that the dramatic circle had got into an impossible situation 

-for who, at this point, could be given the role of heroine and 

when could she learn it? Biifthere are no impossible situations 

for the Security Section! They had made a mess of everythingand 

they will straighten it out! Two days later Davidenkov himself 

was taken off in handcuffs-for trying to transmit something 

outside the compound in writing (another camp chronicle?)", and 

there was to. be a new interrogation and trial! 

9. This is a camp recollection about hitn. On the other hand, it was discovered 

by accident that L. 'K. Chnkovskaya knew Kolya Davidenkov in the . 

queues outside the Leningrad prisons in 1939 when, toward the end of the 

YezhovShchina, he was exonerated by an ordinary court while his codefendant, 

L OumDyev,* remained imprisoned. They did not restore the young man to 

his place in the institute, but took him into the army. In 1941 he was taken 

prisoner by the Germans near Minsk. He then escaped from a German· POW 

camp-to England ••• and while there published, under a pseudonym (in order 

to spare his family), a book about his imprisonment in the Leningrad dungeons 

in 1938. (One bas to suppose that in $ose days love for the Soviet ally prevented 

English readers .from giving due credit to that book. Afterward it was 

f9rgotten and lost. But our people. did not forget him.) He fought on the 

Western Front in the International Anti-Fascist Brigade and, after the war, was 

kidnaped back to the U.S.S.R., where he was sentenced to be shot, but this 

was commuted to a sentence of twenty-five years. Evidently, however, he was 

actually executed on the' basis of the second camp case against hitn. (Under 

capital punishment, which was returned to us by the Decree of January, -1950.) 

In May, 1950, Davidenkov managed to send off his last letter from camp 

prison. Here are several phrases from it: "It is Impossible to describe my whole 

increch"le life during these years. • • • I have a dilferent purpose: over ten 


And so it wasn't necessary to find ~one to play the principal 

role! Napoleon would not be put to shame once more, nor would 

Russian patriotism once more ~ glorified! There would be no 

play at all.! And there would be no choir. And there would be no 

concert. So amateur theatrical activity was at an ebb. The evening 

gatherings in the mess hall and the lovers' rendezvous would 

cease. Till the next rising tide! 

. And so it lived by fits and starts. 

And sometimes everything would have already been rehearsed, 

and aII-the participants would have been left intact, and no one 

would have been rearrested before the performance, but the chief 

of the KVCh, Major Potapov, a Komi· (SevZhelDorlag), would 

pick up the progxam and see there "Doubts, by Glinka." 

"Wllat's this! Doubts? No doubts! No, no, don't even ask 

dna-~'!em he crossed it out. 

And I once planned to read my favorite monologue-Chatsky's 

speech: "But who are the judges?" I had been accustomed 

to reading it since childhood an~ I valued it purely for its rhetoric, 

failing to notice that it was about today. I had no such thoughts. 

But at any rate I.had not gone so far as to write in the progxam: 

"But Who are the judges?" for they would have crossed it out. 

The chief of the KVCh came to rehearsal and jumped up at the 

line which went: 

, Their hostility to the free life was implacable. 

years 1 have inan.aged to accomplish something: my prose, of coUrse, has all 

perished, but my verses remain. 1 have read them to almost no one-there was 

, no' one to read them to . .I remember our nights at the Five Comers and .•• 

conceived the idea that my verses must be got • • • into your wise and skilled 

hands. • • • Read them and if possible preserve them. Of the future, as of the 

past--not a word. Everything is finished." And the verses are preserved entire 

in 1..K.'s hands. How I recognize that tiny script (I, too, wrote like that)- - 

three dozen poems on, a double-sided notebook sheet-you have to work so 

much into such a small areal Just 'imagine this despair at the very end of his 

life: wailing for, death in a camp prison I And he entrusted his last hopeless 

outcry 'to "illegal" mail: 

"I do .not need clean bedclothes, 

Don't open up the doorl 

And it must be truerm 

a cursed and savage beast! 

1 know not wbat to dll with you, 

Or how to add:reSs you: 

Shall 1 sing like a bird, or howl like a wolf, 

Shal1 1 roar or sha1l 1 snarl?"

And when 1 declaimed: 


Where, point out to me, are the fathers of the fatherland? 

Are they not those, rich with plunder? 

he stamped his feet and indicated that 1 get off the stage that instant. 

- 

In my youth 1 had almost become an actor, but a weakness 

of the throat prevented me. And now, in camp, 1 sometimes ap 

. peared in stage performances, and was drawn to refresh myself 

in that brief, unreal oblivion, to see at close range the faces of 

women excited by the -performance. And when I heard that 

special theatrical troupes consisting of zeks freed from general 

work existed in Gulag-genUine serf theaters--I dreamed of getting 

into such a troupe and by this means saving myself and 

breathing a bit more easily. 

Serf theaters existed in every provincial camp administration, 

and there were even several of them in Moscow. The most famous 

was MVD Colonel Mamulov's serf theater at Khovrino. 

Mamulov watched jealously to make sure that none of the notable 

performers of Moscow who had been arrested should slip by him 

through Krasnaya Presnya. And he had his agents searching in 

other transit prisons too. In this way he collected a large theatri 

.cal troupe in his camp and the start of an opera company too. 

His was the pride of an estate owner: "I have a better theater 

than my -neighbor does." There was also a theater in the Beskudnikovo 

Camp, but it was inferior in most respects. The serf 

owners took their players to one another on vjsits in order to 

brag about them. At one such performance Mikhail Grinvald 

forgot in what key to accompany the singer. Then and there 

Mamulov pasted him with ten days of cold punishment cellwhere 

Grinvald fell ill. . 

There were other such serf theaters in Vorkuta, Norilsk, Solikamsk, 

on all the big Gulag islands. And in those areas these 

theaters became almost municipal theaters, almost academic 

theaters, and -gave performances for free people in a municipal 

theater. The local MVD big shots sat haughtily with their wives 

in the first rows and watched their slaves with curiosity and 

contempt. And the convoy guards sat belPnd the scenes and in 

the boxes with their automatic pistols. After the performances 

those players who had won applause were taken back to camp, 


and those who had fallen on their faces ... to punishment block. 

Sometimes they were not "even allowed to enjoy the applause. 

In the Magadan theater, Nikishov, the clUef of Dalstroi, interrupted 

Vadim Kozin, a widely known singer at that time: "All right, 

- Kozin, stop the bowing and get out!" (Kozin tried to hang himself 

but was taken down out of the noose.) 

In postwar years many performers with famous names passed 

" through the Archipelago: In addition to Kozin there were the 

actresses Tokarskaya, Okunevskaya, Zoya Fyodorova. There was 

a big to-do in the Archipelago over the ~est of the singer Ruslanova, 

and there were contradictory rumors about whic~ transit 

prisons she had been at and to which camp she had b~en sent. 

They said that in the Kolyma she had refused to sing and had 

worked in the laundry. I do not lmow. 

The idol of Leningrad, the tenor Pechkovsky, had been in an 

occupied area, at his dacha" near Luga, at the beginning of the 

war and had subsequently performed for the Germans in the 

Baltic States. (His wife, a pianist, had been immediately arrested 

in Leningrad and had perished in the Rybinsk Camp.) After the 

war, Pechkovsky got a tenner for treason and was sent to Pech 

ZheIDorlag. The" chief maintained him there as a VIP in a separate 

little house of his own, with two orderlies attached to him. 

And t)utter, raw eggs, and hot port wine were included in his 

rations. He used to dine with the wife of the chief of the camp 

and the wife of the chief of camp regimen. And he used to sing 

there, but once, they say, he rebelled: "I sing for the people, not 

for Chekists!" And so he was sent to the Special Camp, Minlag. 

(After he had served out his term he was never allowed to rise 

to the heights of his former concerts in Leningrad.) 

The well-known pianist Vsevolod Topilin was not sPared in 

..-the roundup of the Moscow People's Volunteer Corp~ in 1941 

" and was thrown into battle in the Vyazma encirclement with an 

1866 Berdan rifle. 10 But in German captivity a" music-loving 

German major who was camp commandant took pity on him- 

10. AIl that panic with the Moscow Volunteer Corps-what a diabolical 

piece of hysteria that wasl To throw urban intellectuals with Berdan rilles of the 

last century against modem tanksl We had bragged for twenty years that we 

were. "prepared" and that we were strong. But in animal terror in the face 

of the attacking Germans we shielded ourselves with the bodies of scientists 

and actors so that our nonentities in the leadership could survive a few extra 

days.


and helped get him reclassified as an East Zone worker, and he 

began to give concerts again. And for this, of course, Topilin 

then received from us the standard tenner. (And after camp he, 

too, never succeeded in rising again.) 

The ensemble of the Moscow Administration of Corrective 

Labor Camps and Colonies, which went around giving performances 

in the camps and which had been housed at MatroSskaya 

Tishina, was suddenly transferred for a while to our camp at the 

Kaluga Gates. What luck! So now I could get to know them.· And 

perhaps now I would .force my way through to them. 

What a strange sensation! To watch a performance of professional 

zek actors in a camp mess hall! Laughter, smiles, singing, 

white dresses, black frock coats . . . But what were their sentences? 

Under what Code articles had they been imprisoned? 

Was the heroine a thief? Or was she here under the "universally 

available 58"? Was the hero here for bribery or for "Seveneighths"? 

An ordinary actor has one reincarnation only-in his 

role. But here was a double drama, a double reincarnation. First 

one had to pretend to be a free actor or actress, and only then 

play a role. And all that weight of prison, that consciousness that 

you were a serf, that tomorrow the citizen chief might send you 

to the punishment block for playing your role badly or for a 

liaison with a serf actress, or to logging, or six thousand miles to 

the Kolyma. What an added millstone that must be--over and 

above the whole burden the zek actor shared with the free actors 

-that destructive straining of the lungs and throat in order to 

force through oneself a mass of dramatized emptiness, the mechanical 

propaganda of dead ideas?! 

The heroine of the ensemble, Nina V., turned out to be there 

for 58-10, on a five-year sentence. We quickly found a common 

acquaintance-our joint teacher in the art history department of 

the Moscow ~nstitute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. She 

. was a student who had not completed her course, and she was 

very young. Abusing the prerogatives of an actress, she spoiled 

herself with cosmetics and with those vile, cotton-padded shoulders 

with which all women out in freedom were destroying their 

beauty at that time. The women in the. Archipelago had not suffered 

that fate, and their shoulders had developed only from hauling 

hand barrows. 

.. In the ensemble Nina, like every prima, had her own beloved 

SOO 


(a dancer of the Bolshoi Theatre), but she also had there her 

own spiritual father in dramatic art-Osvald Glazunov (Glaznek), 

one of the senior disciples of Vakhtangov. He and his 

wife were-and perhaps they had wanted to be-captured by the 

Germans at a dacha near Istra.outside Moscow. They had spent 

three years of the war in their tiny homeland in Riga, where they 

had performed in the Latvian theater. With the arrival of our 

Soviet forces they had received a tenner each for treason to. the 

big Motherland. And !low they were both in the ensemble. 

Izolda Vikentyevna Glazunova was already old. It was already 

hard for her to dailce. Once only did we see her in a dance which 

was unusual for our time, which I myself would have called impressionist, 

but I am maid to offend connQisseurs. She danced 

in a dark ~ilvery costume that covered her completely on a halfilluminated 

stage. This dance has remained in my -memory. Most 

modem dances are a display of the female body, and that is al- 

_ most all they are. But her dance was some kind of spiritual, 

mystical recollectjon, and reflect~ in. certain of its elements her 

own belief in the transmigration of souls. . 

Suddenly, several days later, furtively, the way prisoner transports 

were always gotten together in tlIe Archipelago, Izolda 

Vikentyevna was sent off on a transport, tom away from her husband, 

carried off to oblivion. 

Among the serf-owning landed -gentry this used to be their 

own special form of cruelty and barbarism: to separate serf 

families, to sell off the husband and wife separately. And for that 

they caught it from Nekrasov, Turgenev, Leskov, and from 

everyone. But with us this was not cruelty, it was simply a wise 

and reasonable move: the old woman did not eam her ration, 

yet she was occupying a staff unit. 

On the day his wife was sent off on the prisoner transport 

Osvald came to our room (the chamber of monstrosities) with 

eyes vacantly wandering, leaning on the. shoulder of his frail 

adopted daughter, as if she were the only thing that gave him 

support. He was nearly insane, and one feared he might do away 

with himself. Then he fell silent and his head drooped. Then he 

gradually began to speak, to recall his entire lif~: He had for 

some reason created two theaters: because of his art he had left 

his wife ali alone -for years. He wished now he could relive his 

entire life differently •...

The Muses in Gulag I - 501 

1 remember them now as if they were sculptured: how the old 

man drew the girl to him by the back of her head, and how she 

looked up at him from under his arm, without stirring, suffering 

with him and trying not' to weep. 

But what is there to say-the old woman had not been worth 

her bread ration .... 

• 

Despite all my efforts, 1 did not succeed in becoming a member 

of that troupe. Soon afterward they left the Kaluga Gates and 

1 lost sight of them. A year later 1 heard a rumor at the Butyrki 

that they had been traveling on a truck to one of their regular 

performances and had been hit by a train. 1 do not know whether 

Glazunov was there or not. But so far as 1 myself was concerned, 

1 onCe more realized that the ways of the Lord are imponderable. 

That we ourselves never know what we want. And- how many 

times in life 1 passionately sought what 1 did IlOt"need and been 

despondent over failures which were successes. 

1 remained there in the modest little amateur theatrical group 

at the Kaluga Gates along with Anechka Breslavskaya, Shurochka 

Ostretsova, and Lyova G. We did manage to put on something 

before they broke us up and sent us away. I now recall my 

participation in that amateur theatrical activity as a lack of 

spiritual toughness, as a humiliation. The worthless Lieutenant 

Mironov, if he had found no other distractions and entertainments 

in Moscow on a Sunday evening, could come to camp in 

his cups and give 9rders: "I want a cOI)cert in ten minutes." 

And the performers wete routed out of bed -or tom away from 

the camp hot plate if they happened at that moment to be engaged 

in cooking with relish something in their mess tins. And in a 

trice we would be singing, dancing, and performing on the-brilliantly 

lit stage before an empty hall, in which the only audience 

was the haughty dolt of a lieutenant and a troika of jailers. 

Chapter 19 

• 

The Zeks as a Nation 

AN ETHNOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 

BY FAN FANYCH 

In this study. if nothing prevents us. we intend to. make an 

important scientific discovery. . 

In the development of our hypothesis we would in no way 

wish to come into conflict with the Progressive Teaching. 

The author of these lines, attracted by the enigma of the native 

tribe populating the Archipelago,. undertook a lengthy scientific 

expedition· there an,d collected abundant material. 

And as a result it is very. easy to prove that the zeks of the 

Archipelago constitute a closs of society. For, after all, this multitudinous 

group (of many. millions) has a single (common to 

them all) relationship to production (namely: subordinate, attached, 

and without any right to direct that production). It also 

has a. single common relationship to the distribution of. the 

products of labor (namely: no relationship at all, ~iving only 

that insignificant share of the products required for. the meager 

support of their Q.wn existence). ADd, in addition, all their labor 

is no small thing. but one of the principal ·constituents of the 

whole state economy. 1 

1. You could never say this of the outcasts in Western countries. There 

they are either lansuishing in inciividuaJ isolation, Where they do no worlt whatever, 

or else there are a few pockets of hard labor, whose output has no 

impact at aJJ on the economy of their country. . 

502

The Zeks as a Nation I 503 

But our ambition is greater than this. 

It would be much more sensational to prove that these degenerate 

creatures (iti the past undoubtedly human) are a totally 

different biological type in comparison with homo sapiens. 2 

However, these conclusions are not yet ready. Here it will be 

possible only to offer certain hints to the reader. Imagine that 

a man is forced suddenly and against his will, yet out of implacable 

necessity and without hope of any return, to make a transition 

into the category of bear or badger. (We are not going to 

employ here that overused image of the wolf.) And should it 

turn out that he proved physically able to make it (and anyone 

who cashed in his chips would not be in demand there anyway), 

- how could he possibly remain a human being while leading a 

new life among the badgers? We think he could not, and that he 

would become a badger: fur would grow; his snout would 

lengthen and sharpen, and he would no longer want or need 

anything cooked or fried: and he would be quite content to bolt 

things raw. 

Picture to yourself that the island environment differs so 

sharply from the normal human one and so cruelly confronts a 

man with the choice of immediate adaptation or immediate death 

that it grinds and masticates his character much more thoroughly 

than could a foreign national or a foreign social environment 

And the only thing it can be compared with is a transmutation 

into the animal world. 

But we will postpone this until our· next work. Here we will 

set ourselves only the limited task of proving that the zeks constitute 

a special sepaJ:ate nation. 

Why is it that classes do not become nations within nations in 

ordinary life? Because they live commingled on the same territory 

with other classes. They encounter tJ:iem on the streets, in stores, 

on trains and steamers, at theaters and places of entertainment, 

and they converse and exchange ideas by voice and through the 

printed word. The zeks, on the contrary, live totally isolated on 

their islands, and their life passes in communication solely with 

one another. (The free employers, their chiefs, they in -the 

majority do not even see, and when they do, they hear nothing 

from them except orders and oaths.) Their ostracism is made all 

2" Perhaps they are, in fact, the "missing link" of the theory of evolution. 


the more profound by the fact that the majority of them have no 

clear possibility of ever abandoning this state before death, in 

other words, of making their way out and up into other, higher 

classts of society. 

Who among us did not learn by heart back in secondary school 

the one-and-only scientific definition of a nation given by Comrade 

Stalin, namely: A nation is an historically formed community 

of people (but one neither racial nor tribal), possessing 

a common territory, a common language, and a commonly shared 

economic life, a community of psychological outlook which is 

Inanifested in a community of culture? Well, now, the natives of 

the Archipelago satisfy all these requirements completely, and 

even more too! (We are particularly free to reach these conclusions 

becaU$e of Comrade Stalin's brilliant remark that a racial 

or tribal community of blood is not obligatory at all!) 

Our natives occupy a fully defined common territory (even 

though itis broken up into islands, but this does not surprise us 

in the Pacific Ocean, for example) on which other peoples do 

not live. Their .economic way of life is standardized to an astonishing 

degree; it can, in fact, be described completely and exhaustively 

on two typewritten sheets of paper (the differential 

ration system and the directions to the bookkeeping office to 

credit the zeks' imaginary wages to maintaining the camp compound, 

the guard, the leadership of the islands, and to the state). 

If one includes in the economy also the tenor of their daily way 

of life, then it is uniform on all the islands to such a degree (like 

nowhere else!) that zeks who have been moved from one island 

to another are never surprised, do not ask silly questions, and at 

once set about their affairs flawlessly from the very first. ("To 

eat on a scientific basis, to steal whenever you can.~') They eat 

food which no one else on earth eats any more. They wear clothes 

which no one else wears any more. And even their daily s~hedule~ 

is-identical on all the islands and obligatory for every zek. (Now 

what ethnographer is able to point to any other nation, all of 

whose members have uniform daily schedules and uniform food 

and clothing?) 

What is comprehended under the heading of community of 

culture in the scientific definition of nations? This has been inadequately 

spelled out for us. We. cannot require of the zeks any 

unity of science or belles-lettres for the simple reason that they 

have no written language. (But then this is also the case with most

-~.-.- 


I 50S 

other island natives, in the majority o~ cases for lack specifically 

of culture, but among the zeks ... because of superfluity of censorship.) 

At the same time we hope to bee able to demonstrate 

amply in our essay the zeks' community of psychology, the urnformity 

of their day-to-day conduct, even the uniformity of their 

philosophical views, of which other peoples could Qnly dream 

and which is not provided for in the scientific definition of nations. 

It is in particular their clearly expressed national character 

that is immediately noted by the scholarly student of the zeks. 

They have their own folklore and their own hero images. Finally, 

they are tightly united by one more corner of culture indissolubly 

linked with language, and which we can describe only approximately 

by the pale term "matyorshchina"-mother cursing 

(from the Latin mater). This is that special form of expressing 

the emotions which is even more important than all the rest of 

their language because it permits the zeks to communicate with 

one another in a more energetic and briefer form than that provided 

by.the usu8I linguistic means. B The permanent psychological 

state of the zeks finds its best release and most accurate expression 

precisely in this highly organized mother cUrsing; And 

therefore all the rest of their language seems to recede into the 

background. But in..this, too, we can observe from Kolyma to 

Moldavia the surprising similarity of expressions representing 

one and the same linguistic logic. . 

Without special study, the language of the natives of the Archipelago 

is quite as incomprehensible to the outsider as any foreign 

language. (Well, now, how for example would the reader understand 

such expressions as these: . 

"Skin the rag!" 

"I'm still clicking!" 

"Give a gliminer [about something]." 

"To pick it off a lamppost!" 

"Crook with crook and suckers out!")'" 

Everything said permits us to affirm boldly that the native 

condition in the Archipelago is a special national condition in 

which the former nationality of a human being is extinguished. 

We ca~ foresee an objection. They will ask us: Is this a 

3. "rbe economy of this means of communication compels one to ponder 

whether it does not contain the rudiments of the Language of the Future . 


people if its ranks ate not replenished by the usual method of 

?gnira~b-dlihc (Incidfntally, in the one-and-only scientific definition 

of nations which" we have cited, no such «riterion" is 

stipulated!) Let us reply: yeS, its ranks are replenished by the 

technical method of jugging (and, out of some strange caprice, 

its own infants are turned over to neighboring peoples). How~ 

ever, chicks, after all, are hatched in an incubator, yet we do not, 

for this reason, cease to regard them as chickens when we use 

their meat. 

But even if some sort of doubt does arise as to how the zeks 

begin their existence, at least there can be no doubt whatever as 

to the method by which they cease to exist. They die, like everyone 

else, only more densely and more prematurely. And their 

funeral rite is gloomy, meager, harsh. 

Two words about the term zek itself; Up to 1934 the official 

term for them was "Lishonnye Svobody"-''Deprived of Freedom." 

This was abbreviated to L/S, and no evidence has been 

preserved as to whether the natives worked these initial~ "L" and 

"s" into "eiesy," but from 1934 on the term was changed to 

"prisoners"-"zaklyuchennye." (Let us recall that the Archipelago 

had begun to. harden by then, and even the official language 

adapted itself to this and could not tolerate there being 

more freedom than prison in the definition of the natives.) And 

they began to abbreviate the term: in the singular Z/K ("zehkab"), 

and in the pl~al Z/K Z/K ("zeh-kab, zeh-kBh"). And' 

this was pronounced very often by the nati~es' guardians and was 

heard by all,and all became accustomed to it. But this bureaucratic 

word could not be declined either by case or by number. It 

was a worthy offspring of" a ~ead and illiterate epoch. The living 

ear of the alert natives could not reconcile itself to this situation, 

and in a .spirit of mockery, on various islands, in various localities, 

they began to adapt it for themselves: in some places they 

said "Zakhar Kuzmich," or, in Nori1sk, "Zapolyamye Komsomoltsy" 

(Arctic Komsomols); in others (for instance, Karelia) 

they tended toward "zak," which was the most correct etymologically, 

and in others (for instance, Inta) they preferred "zyk." 

What I heard was "zek."4 And" in all such instances the new 

4. The old Solovetsky Islands prisoner D.S.L. assures me that as far back 

as 1931 he heard· a convoy guard ask a native: "Who are you? A zek?" 

..


word thus ,brought to life was declined both by number and by 

case. (But in the Kolyma, insists Shalamov, they adhered in 

conversation to the official term "zeh-kah." One can only regret 

that the Kolyma ear must have been numbed by the cold.) * 

• 

The climate of the Archipelago . . . is always Arctic, even if a 

particular islet has intruded itself into the southern seas. The 

climate of· the Archipelago is twelve months of winter, the rest 

summer .. And the air itself there -scorches and pricks one, not 

only because of the frost, not only because of nature. 

Even in summer the zeks are dressed in the soft gray armor 

of padded jaCkets. This in itself, along with the men's cropped 

scalps, gives them a uniformity of external appearance smacking 

of severity, impersonality. But after observing the zeks even 

only a little, you will be equally astonished by the common elements 

in their facial expressions--always guarded, sullen, without 

the slightest good will,. easily slipping into hardness and 

even cruelty. Their facial expressions look as if they have been 

cast from a swarthy, copper-colored material (the ~ks evidently 

belong to the Indian race), rough-textured, almost not of flesh, 

so as to be able to march facing into the wind, expecting at 

every step to be bitten ,from the right or the left. You notice also 

that in action, at work, in a fight, their shoulders are squared, 

and their chests braced for resistance, but as soon as a zek is left 

in a state of inaction, by himself, buried in his thoughts, his 

neck ceases to support the weight of his head, and his shoulders 

and'his back immediately express an inveterate stoop, as if he 

were born with it. The most natural position his hands adopt 

when free is' clasped behind the back if walking, or simply 

hanging limply when sitting down. His stoop and his depressed 

air will remain with him when he approaches you-a free person 

and therefore a possible boss. He will try not to look you in the 

eyes and will instead look at the ground, but if he is forced to 

look at you-you will be surprised by his blank, stupid stare, 

even though it will indicate wiI1ingness'to carry out your orders. 

(Do not trust it, however; he will not carry them out.) If you 

order him to take' off his cap (or if he himself understands he 

should), his shaven ,scalp will surprise you unpleasantly anthro- 


pologically with its bumps, hollows, and asymmetry of a clearly 

degenerate type. 

In conversation with you he will be laconic, speaking· without 

expression--either monotonously and dully or else with servility 

-if it is necessary to ask you for something. But if you somehow 

happen invisibly to overhear the natives when they are talking 

with one another, you will probably remember forever their 

special manner of speech-as if pushing the sounds out, maliciously 

mocking, brusque, and never heartfelt. This is so rooted in 

the natives that even when a man native is left alone with a 

woman native (which, incidentally, is strictly prohibited by the 

. Archipelago laws) it is impossible to imagine his ridding himseH 

of that manner of speech. In all probability he expresses himseH 

to her too in a pushy, peremptory sort of way, for it is quite 

impossible to imagine a zek speaking tender words. But it is 

also impossible not to recognize the great energetic force of the 

zeks' language. In part this is because it is free of all kinds of 

superfluous expressions, of introductory phrases such·as "pardon 

me," or "please," or "if you do not object," and also from superfluous 

pronouns and interjeCtions. The speech of the zek moves 

straight to its goal, just as he himself p1;lshes into the Arctic 

wind. He speaks as if he were punching his companion in the 

mug, beating him with words. lust as an experienced fighter 

invariably tries to knock his enemy off his feet with the very 

first blow, so the zek tries to confound his companion, to render 

him mute,. and even to compel him to wheeze from the very first 

phrase. And he will flatly brush off any question directed at him. 

Even today the reader may encounter this repellent manner· 

in unforeseen circumstances. For example, when you are waiting 

. at a trolleybus stop in a strong wind, your neighbor will spill a 

large hot ash on your ne~ overcoat, threatening to scorch it. 

You demonstratively brush it off, but he continues to spill ashes 

on you. And you say to~: "Listen, comrade, how about being 

more careful with your smoking, eh?" 

Not only does he·not ask your pardon, and not only does he 

take no precautions with his cigarette, but he barks curtly: 

"Haven't you any insurance?" 

And while you are trying to find an answer (you aren't going 

to find one), he already succeeds in clambering ahead of you 

onto the trolleybus. Now that is very much like the native manner.

. The Zeks as a Nation I 509 

Apart from their straight mUltisyllabic curses, the zeks evidently 

have a collection· of ready-made expressions, which will 

paralyze any intelligent outside interference and directions. Such 

expression as: "Don't needle me, I'm of a different religion!" 

"H they're not [beatJing you, don't lie down and ask for it!"· 

(Here in brackets we have used a substitute for anotherobscenC:-word, 

from which the second "Verb in the phrase also 

immediately acquires a quite indecent sense.) 

Similar repellent expressions make a particularly indelible impression 

when coming from the mouths of the native women, 

since it is they in particular who make the most liberal use of 

. erotically based metaphors. We regret that the bounds of morality 

do not permit us to embellish this inquiry with still other examples. 

We will venture to cite just one more illustration of the 

speed and deftness of the zeks in the use of language. A certain 

native named Glik was brought from an ordinary island to a 

special island-to a -secret scientific research institute (certain 

natives are naturally developed to such a degree that they are even 

suitable for conducting scientific research)-but because of 

certain personal considerations the new and privileged place did 

not suit him and he wished to return to his former island. He 

was summoned before a very high-ranking commission, with big 

stars on their .shoulder boards, and there they announced to him: 

''You are ~ radio engineer and we would like to make use of 

you-" 

Without allowing them to finish their sentence with "in your 

profession," he straightened up sharply: "Make use of me? So 

what do you want me to do-tum around and bend over'?" 

And he reached for his belt buckle and made a motion as if to 

adopt the indicated position. Naturally the commission was struck 

dumb, and there was no deal. Glik was dismissed straightaway. 

It is curious to note that even the natives of the Archipelago 

realize very well' indeed that they arouse great interest on the 

part of anthropologists and ethnographers, and they even brag 

of this-it seems to increase their value in their own eyes. Among 

them there is a widespread, frequently told legendary anecdote 

about a certain professor of ethnography, evidently a predecessor 

of ours, who spent his ·whole life studying the breed of zeks and 

wrote a thick dissertation in two volumes in which he came to the 

final conclusion that the prisoner is lazy, greedy, and sly. (At this 


juncture of the story both the storyteller and his listeners laugh 

complacently, as though admiring themselves from the sidelines.) 

But soon' after, apparently, they jugged the professor 

himself. (This is a very unhappy ending, but since no one is 

imprisoned hi our country unless guilty, then there must have 

been something to it.) Then after jostling his way through the 

transit prisons and when he himself became a last-Iegger on 

general work, the professor came to understand his error and 

to realize that in actual fact the convict is rowdy, crafty, and 

transparent. (And this is an extremely apt description and once 

again one that is somehow flattering. And they all laugh once 

again.) . 

We have already said that the zeks have no written language. 

But through the personal example _ of the veteran islanders, in 

oral tradition, and in folklore, the entire code of correct zek 

conduct has been elaborated and is transmitted to newcomersbasic 

precepts relating to their work, to their employers, to those 

around them, and to themselves. AU this code, taken as a whole, 

is imprinted on and exemplified in the moral structure of the 

native, and produces what we can call the zek national type. The 

imprint of this affiliation is driven deep inside the human being 

once and for aU. Many years later, if he turns up outside the 

Archipelago, the first thing you will recognize in the, human 

being is the zek-and only secon4arily the Russian, Tatar, dI..... 

Pole. 

In the rest of our exposition we will try to examine here trait 

by trait in complex detail the con~tituents of the folk character, 

the life psychology, and the normative ethics of the nation of 

zeks. 

• 

Attitude toward government work. -The zeks have an absolutely 

false concept of work as something designed to suck their whole _ 

lives from them, which means that their chief salvation is this: 

while working, not to become absorbed in the work. It is well 

known to a zek that you can't do aU the work (never rush, 

thinking that the sooner you finish, the sooner you can sit down 

and take a rest; the moment you sit down, you will immediately 

be given other work to do) . Work loves fools.


But how do you do it? Do you flatly refuse- to work? That is 

the worst thing the zek can do! He will rot in punishment blocks, 

die of starvation. Going to work is unavoidable. But once there, 

during the workday, what he has to do is not slog away, but 

"fiddle about," not bend the back, but loaf, goldbrick (which 

is to say, not work anyway). The native will never openly or 

flatly refuse to perform any order-that would be the end of 

him. Instead, what he does is ... stretch the rubber. "Stretching 

the rubber" is one of the' principal conceptS and expressions of 

the Archipelago; this is the zek's main salvation and achievement . 

.(.Subsequently widely adopted by the sloggers out in freedom as 

well.) The zek listens carefully to all the orders he is given and 

nods his pead affirmatively. And . . . he goes off to carry out 

those orders. But . . . he does not carry them out! Most often 

of all ... he does not-even begin! This sometimes leads to despair 

on the part of the purposeful and inexhaustible commanders of 

production! And naturally t4e desire arises . . . to hit him with 

a fist in the nose or on the back of the neck, this stupid dumb 

animal in tatters-after all, he has been told in the Russian 

language! What doltish obtuseness is. this? (But that's the point: 

the Russian language is ill understood by the natives, and.a whole 

series of contemporary concepts such as "workers' honor" and 

"conscientious discipline" have no equivalents in their wretched 

language.) However, no sooner has the chief rushed in for the 

second time than the zek_obediently bends his back beneath the 

cursing and immediately begins to carry out the orders. The 

heart of the employer softens a little, ilIld he goes on with his 

multitudinous urgent tasks of management-and the zek, behind 

his back, immediately sits down and stops working. (If 

there is no bri$adier's fiSt hanging' over his h(lad, if he is not 

threatened with being deprived of his bread ration today, and 

also if there is no bait in the shape of time off sentence.) It is 

difficult for us no~al people to understand this psychology, 

but that is how it is. 

Obtuseness? Quite the contrary, it is the highest degree of 

understanding and adaptation to conditions. What can he count 

on? After all, work does not get done by itself, .and if the chief 

comes around once more, will that be any worse? But here is what 

he is counting on: Most likely of all, the chief won't come around 

for the third time today. And you have to survive until tomorrow. 


Tonight the zek might be sent off on a prisoner transport, or 

transferred to another brigade, or put in hospital, or imprisoned 

in the punishment block-and whatever he has done today will 

then be credited to someone else. Or tomorrow that same zek 

and that same brigade !night well be transferred to some other 

work. Or else the chief might decide that what they were doing 

isn't necessary, or ought to be done quite differently. And on the 

basis of many such cases the zeks had firmly mastered the truth: 

. Do not do today what you can do tomorrow. Or in zek lingo: 

Wherever you sit down is where you get off. He is fearful of expending 

an extra calorie where it maybe doesn't need to be 

expended. (Incidentally, the concept of calories is well known and 

very popular among the natives.) And that is how the zeks talk 

frankly among themselves: The one who pulls is the one they urge 

on. (And the one who doesn't, supposedly, is let off with a shrug.) 

In general the zek works just to get through the day to the night. 

(But at this point scholarly integrity obliges us to admit a 

certain weakness in our course of reasoning. First of all, because 

the camp. rule of "The one who pulls is the one they urge on" 

turns out to be simultaneously an old Russian proverb. And we 

also find in Dal~ another purely zekish expression: "He lives 

just to get through· the day to the night." Now this coincidence 

arouses a whole whirlwind of thoughts in us: The theory of 

borrowing? The theory of migratory themes? A school of 

mythology? Continuing these dangerous comparisons, we find 

among the Russian proverbs and sayings which took shape under 

serfdom and were already well established by the nineteenth 

century the following: 

''Don't do the work, don't run from work." [Astonishing! This 

is the very principle of camp "rubber."] 

"May God grant we know how to do everything, but not do 

it all." 

"You will never finish the master's work." 

"A zealous horse doesn't live long."· 

"They'll give you a chunk of bread, and for that you'll have 

to thresh for a whole week." [This is very much like the zeks' 

reactionary theory that even a big bread ration doesn't make 

up for the expenditure of energy in labor.] 

So what conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That across 

5. V. Dal, Poslovitsy Russkogo Naroda (Proverbs of the Russian People), 

Moscow, 1957, p. 257.


all the bright boundary lines of our emancipatory reforms, our 

erilightenment, our revolutions, and our socialism, the serfs of 

the -Empress Catherine's time and the zeks of Stalin's time, notwithstanding 

their complete dissimilarity in social position, reach 

out to shake each other's black and horny hands? That is impossible! 

At this point our erudition breaks down and we will return 

to our exposition.) 

From the zek's relationship to his werk there follows also .his 

relationship to his chiefs. Outwardly the zek is very obedient. 

For example, one of the zek "comandments~' is Don't stick 

your neck out! In other words, never talk back' to the chiefs. In 

appearance the zek is very much afraid of the chief, bends his 

back when a chief scolds him or even just stands near him. But 

in fact this is a simple calculation: to avoid unnecessary punishments. 

In actual fact the zek utterly despises the bosses-both the 

camp chiefs and the pr:oduction chiefs--but covertly conceals it 

so as 'not to suffer for it. Departing in a throng after any sort of 

work announcements, reprimands, or official rebukes, the zeks 

laugh quietly among themselves: It may have been said, but we'll 

manage to forget it! The zeks inwardly consider themselves to 

be the superiors of their chiefs-both in literacy and in their 

mastery of work skillS, and in their general level of compre:' 

hension of the circumstances of life. And one has to admit that 

that is how it often is, but here in their self-satisfaction: the zeks 

fail to see that, on the other. hand, the administration of the 

islands possesses a permanent superiority over the natives by 

virtue of its world outlook. That is why the naive concept of the 

zeks that the chiefs' principles are I do as I please! or The law 

here is me! is really quite unfounded. 

However, this gives us a convenient opportunity to draw a 

distinction between the native status and the Old Russian 

serfdom. The serf-peasant did not like his nobleman-owner, 

and made fun of him, but had grown accustomed to feeling something 

superior in him, as a result of which there was a multitude 

of characters like Savelich and Firs who were dedicated slaves. 

Bpt now this spiritual slavery has ended once, and for all. And 

among the tens of millions ·of zeks it is quite impossible to 

imagine even one who sincerely worships his chief. 

Anq. in this respect there is an important national difference 

l1~wteb the zeks and your and my~o.mpatriots, dear reader: 


The zeks do not strive for praise, nor for honorary diplomas, nor 

to have their names posted on Red Bulletin Boards of Honor 

(unless these are directly tied in with supplementary rations) .. 

Everything that is called the glory of labor out in freedom is for 

the zeks, in their stupidity, only a dull and hollow sound. In 

tlIis they are all the more independent of tlIeir guardians and of 

the necessity to please. 

As a generalization, the entire scale of values is topsy-turvy 

among the zeks, but this need not surprise us if we recall that 

it is always th~t way among savages: for a tiny little mirror they 

are willing to part with a big fat pig; for cheap little beads, with 

a basket of cocoa beans. Those things that are precious to us, dear 

reader, such as ideological values, self-sacrifice, dedication, and· 

the desire to labor selflessly for tlIe future, tlIese are not only 

quite absent among the zeks but are even considered worthless. 

It is enough to say that the zeks are totally deprived of patriotic 

sentiment and do not like tlIeir own native islands in the least. 

Let us recall the words of tlIeir own folk song: 

Be tlIou damned, 0 Kolyma! 

Snakes invented this planet! 

Because of this they rarely undertake long and risky journeys 

in search of happiness, which are called, in tlIeir dialect, escapes. 

Most highly esteemed of all among tlIe zeks, occupying first 

place in terms of the value placed on it, is the bread ration-a 

- piece of black bread with additives in it, badly baked, which 

you and I would be unwilling to eat. And among the zeks the 

bigger and heavier the ration is, the more precious it is. Anyone 

who has ever seen tlIe greed witlI which tlIe zeks hurl themselves 

on tlIeir morning bread ration, almost devouring tlIeir hands 

along with it; will have a


I SIS 

on parade, in exact step with one another, in gleaming uniforms 

and flourishing weapons, does not leave such a fearsome impression 

on the viewer as does the evening entry of a brigade of 

zeks into the mess hall to get their gruel-those shaven heads, 

those slapdash caps, tatters tied together with strings,. those 

mean crooked faces (how do they get those muscles and sinews 

from that gruel?). And in they go, with twenty-five pairs of shoes 

. and rope and bast sandals-tup-tup, tup-tup, left, right, give us 

our ration, bosses! Anyone who's not of our faith, get out of the 

.way! And on the twenty-five faces at the moment of seizing their 

. prey the national character of the Zeks is disclosed to you 

distinct and clear. 

~W note the fact that in reaching conclusions about the zeks 

we can hardly imagine them as individuals, their separate personalities 

and names. But that is not a fault of our method. It is a 

reflection of that herd structure of life in which this -outlandish 

people:: lives, renouncing family life. and the creation of heirs, 

which are so traditional among .other peoples. (They are convinced 

that their population will be replenished by other means.) 

This collective way of life is extremely characteristic of the 

Archipelago-be it an inheritance from primitive society or 

the dawn of the future. Probably it is the future. . 

The next most· highly valued thing among the zeks is sleep. 

A normal human being can only be astounded at how much a 

zek is capable of sleeping and in what varied circUJDStances. One 

hardly need. say that insomnia is quite unknown among them. 

They take no sleeping pills. They sleep every night through 

without waking. And if they happen to get a day free of work, 

ithey sleep right through it. It has been reliably established that 

they are able to fall asleep when seated beside empty hand 

barrows while the latter are being loaded; They are able to fall 

asleep out at line-up with their legs spread wide apart, and they 

are also able to fall asleep even when marching unde1 guard to 

work, but not all of them-some of them keel over and wake up . 

. And the basis ofall this is: during sleep the sentence passes more 

quickly. And, in addition: the night is for sleep, and the day is for 

restfG 

Let us return to the image of the brigade stamping in to get 

6. It is paradoxical, but the Russian people have similar proverbs: "I eat 

while I'm marching, and sleep while I'm standing," "Where there's a nook or 

y~rc there's a bed." 

516. I THE GULAG AR.CHIPELAGO 

its "lawful" (as they call it) gruel. We see an expression here 

of one of the principal national traits of the zek people--vital 

drive. (Nor does 'this contradict their inclination to keep dropping 

off to sleep. That is, in fact,why they sleep, so as to have the 

strength for their drive in the interim!) This drive is both literal 

and physical, and continues right up to the finish line of their 

goals--foOd, a warm stove, a clothes drier, shelter from the rain. 

And in all that pushing and shoving the zek does not hesitate to . 

stick his shoulder in his neighbor's side. And if two zeks are 

going to pick up a tree trunk, both of them head for the top end, 

so that the other will get the thick end. And this drive exists in 

a more general sense--a drive to get the most advantageous position 

in life. In the cruel island conditions (so close to the conditions 

of life in the animal kingdom that we can without fear of 

contradiction apply here the Darwinian "struggle fQr life"·) life 

itself often depends on success or failure in the struggle for a 

place--and in driving a path for oneself at the cost of others, the 

natives acknowledge no restraining ethical principles. They themselves 

say straight out: "Conscience? It got left in my case file." 

In taking vitliI decisioqs they are guided by the well-known rule 

of the Archipelago: It is better to be a son-of-a-bitch than to 

sutler. . 

But this drive can be successful only if it is accompanied by 

practical agility and resourcefulness in the most difficult situations. 

T The zek has to.manifest this quality every day, for the 

simplest and the most insignificant purposes: to safeguard his 

pitiful dregs of property-some dented mess tin, stinking rags, a 

wooden spoon, his handy needle. However, in the struggle for an 

important position in the island hierarchy--even this resourc~' 

fulness must become calculated trickery of a superior, more 

subtle, more ingenious.--order. So as not to weigh down this 

inquiry-here is one example. A certain zek managed to secure 

the important position of chief of the camp workshops. Certain 

kinds of work~ere successfully carried out in his workshops, 

and others not, but the strength of his position depended not :so 

much on the successful completion of his work as o~ his ability 

to blutJ. Some MVD officers came to his office and saw some. 

7. The R.ussians say: "He bows with his front, watches out with his side. 

and feels his way with his rear."


ceramic cones on his desk. "~hat are they?" "Seger cones." 

"What are they for?" "To determine the temperature inside. the 

ovens." "Aha!" drawled out the chief, thinking to himself: "Well, 

I certainly put a good engineer in the job." But those cones 

could not be used to determine temperatures through their 

melting point, because they weren't made of standardized clay and 

their composition was unknown. The cones started to become 

·overfamiliar--and soon the chief of the workshops had a new 

toy on his· desk--an optical instrument without a single lens 

(where in the Archipelago would you find a lens?). And again 

everyone was astounded. 

And the zek's mind had continually to be occupied with such 

sideways feints as these. 

According to the circumstances, and his psychological appraisal 

of the enemy, the ·zek had to demonstrate flexibility 01 

conduct-ranging from a crude move with fist or voice up to the 

most delicate kind of pretense, from total sRmelessness to sacred 

fidelity to a promise given face to face, which one would not 

think to be at ail compulsory. (Thus for some reason all zeks 

were as faithful as saints to thc;ir promises of secret brib~s and 

exceptionally patient and conscientious in carrying out private 

commissions. When we see some wonderful Archipelago handicraft 

work with carving and inlays, the likes of which ·can otherwise 

be seen only in the Ostankino Museum, * it is impossible 

to believe that this was done by those same hands which turned 

over to the foreman -work that was held together only by a peg 

so that it would fall apart immediately.) 

This flexibility of conduct was also reflected in the famous· zek 

rule: "II they give-take it; il they beat.:..-.beat it." 

The most important condition of success in the life struggle 

of the Gulag islanders is their secretiveness. Their character and 

their intentions are so profoundly hidden that to the inexperienced 

novice employer it seems at the· outset as if the zeks bend 

like a blade of grass-beneath the wind and the boot.8 (Only 

subsequently does he become bitterly convinced of the cunning 

and insincerity of the islanders.) Secretiveness is almost the 

most characteristic trait of the zek tribe. The zek has to hide his 

intentions and acts, both from the employers and trom the jailers, 

8. Compare the proverb of the Russians: "It is better to bend than to break." 

S18 


and from the brigadiers and from the so-called "stoolies."' He 

has to conceal his successes so that they will not be outdone. He 

has to conceal his plans, his calculations, and his hopes, whether 

he be preparing for a big "escape" or has figured out where to 

collect shavings for a mattress. In the zek life it is always the 

case that to disclose means to lose .... One native, whom 1 treated.. 

to makhorka, explained it to me this way (I present it here in 

translation): "n you disclose a warm place to sleep where the 

foreman won't find you, everyone will rush there, and the foreman 

will smell it out. n you disclose that you have sent a letter 

out through a free person, to then everyone else will hand his 

letters to that free person, and they will catch him with the 

letters. And if the storeroom clerk has promised to exchange 

your tom shin--shut up till you have exchanged it, and when you 

have, shut up some more: you won't give him away, and he 

will be usefullo you later on.'011 With the years the zek becomes 

so accustomed to hiding everything that he no longer has to 

exen any e1fon at all to this end; the natural human desire to 

share what he has experienced dies in him. (Should we perhaps 

~ocer in this secretiveness some son of defense reaction 

against the secret course of evenis in general? After all, they also 

do all they can to conceal from him information concerning his 

own fate.) 

The secretiveness of the zek flows also from his all-round mistrustfulness; 

he mistrusts everyone around him. An act that appears 

to -be unselfish arouses his especially strong suspicion. The 

law of the taiga-that is how he formulates the highest imperative 

of human relationships. (On the islands of the Archipelago there 

really are great tracts of taiga.) 

The native who in the highest degree combines and manifests 

these tribal qualities-the drive for life, pitilessness, resourcefulness, 

secretiveness, and mistrustfulness--calls himself, and is 

called by others, a son of Gulag. This, among them, is like the 

title "honorary citizen," and it is acquired, of course, through long 

years of life on the islands. 

9. An insignificant phenomenon of the Archipelago upon which we consider 

it superfluous to dwell in this essay. 

10. An official postal service does exist on the islands of the Archipelago. 

but the natives prefer not to make use of iL 

II. Compare this proverb among the Russians: "If you have found something. 

shut uP. and if you have lost something. shut up too." Frankly speaking. 

the parallelism of these rules of life leave us somewhat puzzled.


A son of Gulag believes himself impenetrable, and also that 

he, on the contrary, can see right through those around him and, 

as the phrase goes, six feet beneath them too. Maybe this is so, 

but at this point it becomes apparent that even- the most penetrating 

of the zeks possesses a narrow range of outlook, a short 

view ahead. While judging very soberly actions close to them, and 

while very precise in calculating their behavior in the hours 

immediately ahead, the rank-and-file zeks and even the sons of 

Gulag, tQo, are incapable either of· thinking abstractly or· of 

grasping phenomena of a general nature, or even of speaking 

about the future. Even in their grammar the future tense is very 

rarely used; even with regard to the morrow it is applied with 

a conditional nuance--and still more carefully to the subsequent 

days of the same week, and you will never hear from a zek such 

~ sentence as ''Next spring I will '.' ." Because they all know that 

they still 4ave to make it through the winter, and that any day 

fate can hurl them from one island to another. In real truth: "My 

day is my epoch!" 

The sonS of Gulag are also the chief bearers of the traditions 

and the so-called zek commandments. On the various· islands the 

number of these commandments varies, and they are not always 

formulated the same way either. And to work toward their systematization 

would be a very interesting subject for a separate 

inquiry. These commandments have nothing in common with 

Christianity. (The zeks are not only an atheistic people, but in 

general nothing is sacred to them, and they always hasten to 

ridicule and degrade anything lofty. And this,. too, is reflected 

in their language.) But as the sons of Gulag affirm: H you live 

according to their commandments, you will not perish in the 

Archipelago. . 

There are certain precepts, such as: Don't squeal! (How is one 

to understand this? Evidently they are desirous of avoiding superfluous 

noise?},~d: Don't lick the.bowls; in other words, 40 not 

descend to slops, something they consider a swift and abrupt way 

to die. And: Don't scavenge. And others. 

There is an interesting commandment: Don't shove your nose 

in someone else's mess tin! This seems to us to represent a great 

achievement of native thought; you see, this is the principle of . 

negative freedom; it is the slogan ''My home is my castle!" turned 

around, so to speak, and even improved upon, because it is a 

matter not of one's own mess tin but of someone else's (and yet 


"one's own" is, of course, understood). Knowing the native conditions, 

we have to understand here the term "mess tiD" in the 

broadest sense-not merely as a dented and sooty dish, nor even 

as the specific unappetizing dishwater contained in it, but also 

as all the means of getting something to eat, all the means in the 

struggle for existence, and even more broadly: as the zek's soul. 

In a word, "Let me live as I wish, and you live as you wish" 

that is what this precept means. A hard and cruel son of Gulag, 

uncler this precept, undertakes the obligation not to use his 

. strength and drive out of empty curiosity. (But at the same time 

he frees himself of any kind of moral obligation: "Even if you are 

croaking right next to me, it's none of my affair." This is a cruel 

law, yet it is much more humane than the law of the thieves-- 

-the island cannibals: "You today, me tomorrow." The cannibal-thief 

is not in the least indifferent to his neighbor; he will 

speed up the latter's death so as to put off his own or sometime~ 

just for the hell of it or even for the amusement of watching it.) 

Finally, there is one composite. commandment: Don't trust, 

don't fear, don't beg! In this commandment the common, national 

character of the zek is cast, like a'piece of sculpture, with sharp 

definition. 

How can one (in freedom) rule over a people which is totally· 

steeped in such a proud commandment? It is awesome even to 

think of it! 

This commandment leads us to consider not ~o much the life 

style of the zeks as their psychological essence. 

The first thing we note from the start in a son of Gulag, and 

then observe more and more frequently, is spiritual equilibrium, 

psychological stability. In this regard the zek's general, overall 

philosophical view of his place in the universe is highly interesting. 

As distinct from the Englishman or the Frenchman, who is 

proud all his life of having been born an Englishman or a Frenchman. 

the zek is not at all proud of his nationalliffiliation; on the 

contrary, he perceives it as a cruel trial, but a trial he wishes to 

endure with dignity. The zeks have a particularly notable myth, 

which holds that somewhere there exist "the gates of the Archipelago" 

(compare with the pillars of Hercules in antiquity), and 

that on the outside of these gates there is a sign for those who 

enter: "DO NOT LOSE HEART'" And on the other side there is a 

sign for those who are leaving: "00 NOT BE OVERJOYED'" And


the main thing, the zeks add, is that these signs are visible only 

to the wise, and foolS do not see -them. Often this myth is expressed 

as a simple rule of life: "Newly arriving, do not be sad; 

newly departing, do not be glad." It is in this key that the views 

of the zeks on the Archipelago and on the life taking place in 

the space abUtting on it must be perceived. Such a philosophy 

is the source of the zek's psychological stability. No matter how 

darkly circumstances may be stacked against him, he knits the 

brows of his rough and weathered face and says: "They cannot 

drop me any deeper than a mine." Or they comfort each other: 

"It could be worse." And in reality, this conviction "It could be 

even worse!'~ clearly supports and encourages them in the most 

profound suffering of famine, cold, and spiritual depression . 

. The zek is always expecting it to be worse. That is how he 

lives, constantly awaiting the blows of fate and stings of the evil 

spirit. And, on the other hand, he perceives every temporary 

relaxation as an oversight, a mistake. In this constant expectation 

of misfortune the austere soul of the zek matures, stoically hardened 

to its own fate, and pitiless toward the fates of others. 

The zek's deviations from his state of equilibrium are very 

minor-either on the dark side or the bright side, either on the 

side of despair or on the side of happiness. 

This was felicitously expressed by Taras Shevchenko (who 

spent a little time on the islands in prehistoric times): "I now 

have almost neither grief nor gladness. On the other hand, there 

is a moral calm like the cold-bloodedness of a fish. Is it possible 

that constant suffering can rework a human being in this way?"12 

Indeed! Yes. Indeed it can. A stable, in4ifJerent state of mind 

is the zek's indispensable defense so he can survive long years of 

grim island life. If he does not attain this smoldering, lusterless 

state of mind in his first year in the Archipelago, ordinarily he 

dies. Once he has attained it, he continues to live. In a word: If 

you don't kick the bucket-you'll become an adept.- 

All the zek's feelings are dulled, and his nerves coarsened. 

Having become indifferent to his own grief, and to the punishments 

which the guardians of the tribe have laid upon him, and 

even, by then, almost to his whole life-he does not experience 

any spiritual sympathy for the grief of those around him either. 

12. In a letler to Repnina. 


Somebody's outcry of pain or even women's tears barely compel 

him to turn his head-so dulled have his reactions become. Often 

the zeks show no mercy to .inexperienced newcomers and laugh 

at their errors and misfortunes-but do not judge them severely 

for this: they are not doing it out of malice-their sympathies 

have simply atrophied, and all that remains noticeable to them 

is the funny side of events. 

- _ The inost prevalent world outlook _ among them is fatalism. 

This is their profound; universal trait. It is to be explained by 

their dependent situation, their total lack of knowledge of what 

will happen to them even in the most immediate future, and their 

actual inability to influence events. Fatalism is even necessary to 

the zek because it confirms him in his spiritual stability. The son 

of Gulag believes that the most tranquil course is to put his faith 

in fate. The future is a cat in a sack, a pig in a poke, and not 

understanding it cleariy, and having no idea what's going to 

happen to you in the possible variations of life lying ahead, you 

don't need to strive too insistently for something or reject something 

too obstinately-be it a, transfer to another barracks, or 

brigade, or camp. Maybe it .will be for the better, maybe for the 

worse, but you are free'of self-reproaches; let it be worse for you, 

but it wasn't done by your own hands. And this is how you preserve 

that precious feeling of dauntlessness, how you save yourself 

from fussing and ingratiating. _ 

Given such a dark fate, the zeks have many strong superstitions. 

One of them is closely bound up with their fatalism: If 

you worry too much about your conditions or even your own 

comfort, you are bound to get burned by a prisoner transport. 13 - 

The fatalism' widely prevalent among them extends not only 

to their personal- fate but also to the overall course of things. 

The last thing in their mind is that the overall course of events 

could b~ ch,ged. They imagine that the_ t\rchipelago has existed 

_ jor all eternity and that earlier it was even worse. 

But probably the most interesting psychological twist here is 

the fact that the zeks perceive their own stable state of equanimity 

in these ,primitive and wretched circumstances as a victory for 

13. Fires in their literal.sense don't frighten the zeks. They don't value the 

shelters they live in, and they don'tQeven try to save burning building~, since 

they are certain that they will always be replaced. To get burned is a phrase 

used only in the sense of their personal fate.

The Zelcs as a Nation I 523 

love of life. It is quite ,enough'1or the sequence of misfortunes to 

slow down a little, for the blows of fate to slacken just !l' little, 

for the ze!c to express his satisfaction with life and take pride in 

his own conduct in it. Perhaps the reader will find it easier to 

believe in this paradoxical trait if we cite Chekbov. In his story, 

"In Exile," the boatman Semyon Tolkovy expresses this feeling 

as follows: 

1 ... have brought myself to the point where I can sleep naked on the 

earth and eat grass. And may God grant everyone a life like that. 

[Our italics.] I need nothing, and I fear no one, and 1 understand 

myself so well that no man is richer and freer than I. 

These asto:nishing words still ring in our ears; we have heard' 

them many times from zeks of the Archipelago. (And the only 

surprise is, where could Chekbov have p~cked them up?) "And 

may God grant everyone a life like thatl" How would you like 

that? 

Up to the present, we have been speaking of the positive aspects 

of the national character. But we cannot shut our eyes to its 

negative aspects, to certain touching nationai weaknesses which 

seem to stand as exceptions and contradictions of the foregoing. 

The more dauntless and stem the disbelief of this atheistic 

people (which, for example, completely ridicules the Gospel 

teaching which says, "Judge not, that ye be not judged,'~ holding 

that judgments-in other words, sentences-don't depend on 

that), the more feverishly is it aftlicted nonetheless by attacks of 

thoughtless gullibility. Here one can draw a distinction: Within 

that closely circumscribed field of vjsionwhere the zek can see 

well, he believes in nothing. But deprived of an abstract vision, 

deprived of historical perspective, he swallows with the inoce~ce 

of a savage any farfetched rumor, any native miracles. 

An ancient example of native trustfulness waS the hope placed 

in Gorky's anival on Solovki. But there isn't any need to go that 

far back. There is an almost permanent aw! almost universal 

religion in the Archipelago; this is faith in the so-called Amnesty. ' 

It is difficult to explain just what this is. It is not the name of a . 

goddess. as the reader might have thought. It is something akin 

to the Second Coming among Christian peoples, it is a burst· of 

such blinding radiance that the ice of the Archipelago will melt 


and even the islands themselves VJill dissolve, and all the natives 

will b~ swept on warm waves to sunny regions where they will 

immediately find their nearest and most beloved. Probably this 

is a somewhat transformed faith in the Kingdom of Heaven on 

earth. This faith, which has never yet been confirmed by one 

single real miracle, is nonetheless very much' alive and persistent. 

And just as other peoples connect their important rituals with the 

winter and summer solstices, so, too, the zeks mystically await 

(always in vain) the first days of November and May. If a south 

wind blows on the Archipelago, they will immediately whisper 

from ear to ear: "There's bound to be an amnesty! It is already 

under way!" And when the· winter winds set in in earnest, the 

zeks warm their numbed fingers by breathing on them, rub their 

ears, stamp up and down, and encourage one another. ''That 

means there will be an amnesty. Otherwise we'll freeze to ---I 

.[Here there is an untranslatable expression.] Evidently it's going 

to come now." 

The harmfulness of every religion has long since been demonstrated 

and proved-and we see the same thing here too. These 

beliefs in Amnesty seriously weaken the natives, indu,?ing in 

them an uncharacteristic state of dreaminess, and there are 

periods of epidemic when necessary and urgent government work 

quite literally falls from the zeks' hands-which, practically 

speaking, is the same effect as that produced by the opposite kind 

of rumor about "prisoner transports." For everyday construction 

work it is much more advantageous for the natives not to experience 

any ups and downs of feeling. 

And the zeks also suffer frQm a certain national weakness, 

which in some incomprehensible fashion they retain despite the 

whole structure of their life. This is their secret thirst for justice. 

Chekhov, too, observed this strange· feeling on an island which, 

in fact, did not belong to our Archipelago at all: "The hard-labor . 

prisoner, no matter how profoundly depraved and unjust he 

himself was, loved justice above all, and if it was not to be found 

among the peoplt placed over him, then year after year he fell 

into a state of anger, into extreme mistrust." 

Even though· Chekhov's observations do not in any respect 

refer to our case, yet they astonish us with their accuracy. 

Beginning with the zeks' arrival in the Archipelago, every day 

and every hour of their life here is one continual injustice, and


in this situation they themselves commit only injustices-and 

one would think it had. long since been time for them to grow 

used to it and to accept injustice as theumversal norm of life. 

But no; not at all! Every injustice on the part of the elders in the 

tribe and the tribal guardians continues to wound them, and to 

wound them. just as much as it did on their first day. (But injustice 

which rises from the bottom to the top provokes their 

hearty and ap)'roving laughter.) And in their folklore they do 

not create legends so much about justice as, in an exaggeration 

of this feeling, about unjustified magnanimity. (And thus it was 

that the myth about magnanimity to F. Kaplan was created and 

lasted for decades in the Archipelago-alleging that she had not 

been shot but confined for life in various prisons, and there were 

even many witnesses to be found who had been with her on 

prisoner transports or had received books from the Butyrki Prison 

library from her.14 One asks why the. nativeS needed this nonsensical 

myth. Only as an extreme case of inordinate magnanimity 

in which they wanted to believe. They·then in their 'mind's 

eye could apply it to themselves.) 

Instances are also known of a zek's coming to love his work 

in the Archipelago (A. S. Bratchikov: "I am proud of what I 

made with my own hands"), or afleast not disliking it (the zeks 

of German origin), but these cases are so exceptional that we' are 

not going to offer them even. as an eccentricity, let alone a universal 

trait of the people. 

And let not the already cited native trait of secretiveness seem 

in contradiction with another native trait: a love of telling stories 

about the past. Among all backward peoples this is a custom of 

the old men; and people of middle age actively dislike talking 

~uoba the past and are even ~aid to (particUlarly women, and 

particularly people filling out security questionnaires, yes,and in 

general everyone). In this regard the zeks behave like a nation 

14. Not long ago the Commandant of the Krenilin, Comrade Malkov, officially 

repudiated these rumors and described how he had shot Kaplan at the . 

time. And Demyan Bedny was present at the execution too. And her absence 

as a witie~s at the trial of the SR's in 1922 ought to have convinced the zeks! 

But they don't remember that trial at all. We suppose tIuit the rumor about the 

life imprisonment of F. Kaplan arose from the life imprisonment of Berta 

Gandal. This woman, suspectiOg nothing, arrived in MoJcpw from Riga on the 

very day.of the attempted assassination of Lenin, ",bllll thll brothers Gandal 

(who 'bad been waiting in an automobile for Kaplan) 1II{Cq-..... Awl that .was 

why Berta got life imprisonment. 

526 I THE. GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

consisting only of old men. (In another respect-smce.they have 

instructors-they are, on the contrary, maintained like a nation 

of children.~ You wouldn't be able to squeeze a word out of them 

about the petty secrets of today's daily life-such as where to 

warm up .one's mess tin, or who's got makhorka to barter-but 

they will tell you everything about the past without concealment, 

disclosing everything: how they lived before the Archipelago and 

with whom and how they got here. (For hours at a time they 

listen to stories

The Zeks os a Nation I 527 

and invented (but extremely plausible) episodes are inserted in. 

them. And the zek storyteller (and his listeners) feel a life-giving 

return of self-confidence. 

This self-confidence is strengthened in another way too-by 

multitudinous folk tales about the cleverness and luck of thezek 

people. These are rather crude stories, recalling the. soldiers' 

legends of the times of Tsar Nicholas I (when soldiers were conscripted 

for twenty-five years). They Will. tell you how a certain 

zek went to the chief to split wood for the kitchen-and how the 

chiefs daughter ran out to him in the woodshed. Or how a ,.y 

orderly made a crawl hole underneath the barracks and put a pot 

uncler.the drain in the ftoorof the parcel room. (There was s0metimes 

vodka in parcels from outside, but there was a prohibition 

law on the Archipelago, and, with due documentation, they w!ll'C 

supposed to .pour out all the vodka right on the ground-but they 

never ever did pour it out-and so this duty orderly supposedly 

collected it in his pot and ·was always drunk.) 

In general, the zeks· value and love humor-and this is best 

evidence of all of the healthy psychological state of those natives 

who manage not to die during their first year. They proceed on 

the theOry that tears will not justify you nor laughter get you into 

debt. Humor is their constant ally, without which, very likely, 

life in the Archipelago would be totally impossible. They value 

curses, too, particularly for their humor; the funnier they are, 

the more convincing to them. Their every reply to a question, 

their every judgment about their surroundings, is spiced with at 

least a ·mite of humor. Ask a zek how much time he has spent 

already in the Archipelago and he will not tell you, "Five years," 

but, instead, "Well. I've sat through five Januarys." 

(For some reason they refer to their stay in the Archipelago 

as sitting, even though they spend least of all their time sitting.) 

"Is it hard?" you ask him. 

"Only the first ten years," he replies mockingly. 

And if you sympathize with him because he has to live in such 

a difficult climate, he . will reply: ''The climate's bad, but the - 

company's good." '. 

And they will say about someone who has left the AEchipelago: 

''They gave him three; he sat out five, and they re1eased~ ahead 

of time." . 

And when prisoners began to arrive in the Archipelago with 


excUrsion tickets for twenty-five years: "Now you'll be looked 

after for the next twenty-five years." 

And in general the zeks talk this way about the Archipelago: 

"Whoever hasn't been ther~ yet . . . will get there, and whoever 

has been there ... won't forget it." 

(This is a case of an unlawful generalization; you and I, reader, 

do not intend to go there at all, right?) And wherever and whenever 

the natives hear someone ask to be given more of something 

(even if only hot water in a mug), they all immediately shout in 

a ~horus: "The prosecutor will give you morer' 

, (In general, the zeks have an incomprehensible hostility toward 

prosecutors, and it frequently bursts out. For example, in 

the Archipelago the unjuSt expression is.Widespread: "The prosecutor 

is a chopper." . 

Beyond its exact rhyme, in Russian,· we do not see any meaning 

in this phrase. With deep regret we have to note here a case 

of the split. between associative and causative connections which 

reduces the zek's thought processes below the average level common 

to all mankind. We will have more to say about this anon.) 

Here are some additional examples of their cute, good-natured 

jokes: 

''He sleeps and sleeps, but has no time for rest." 

"If you don't drink your water, where will you get your 

strength?" 

At the end of the working day (when the zeks are already 

exhausted and waiting for knocking-off time) they invariably 

joke abOut the detested work: "Well, the work just got going, 

but the day is too short." 

And in the morning, instead of setting about work; they go . 

from place to place and say: "The night should .come sooner, so 

. tomorrow [I] we could go to workl" 

And het:e is where we see the gaps in their, logic. There is a 

well7known native' expression: "We didn't plant that forest, so 

we won't cut it down." 

But if one reasons that way, the logging camps didn't plant 

the forest either, yet they cut them down very successfully tndeed! 

So' what «te have here is a childishriess typical of the native way 

of thought; an idiosyncratic form of dadaism. 

Or here again, from the time of the Belomor Calial: "Let the 

bears do the work."


Well, how, speaking seriously, can one imagine a bear digging 

the great canal? The question of bears' working was adequately 

. treated in the works of I. A. Krylov. If there were the sligh~est 

possibility of harnessing bears for useful work-do 'not do}~bt that 

it would have been done in recent decades and we would have 

whole bear brigades and labor camps for bears. 

True, the natives have a parallel expression .about bears, which 

is highly unjust but caustic: ''The chief is a bear." 

We cimnot even understand what association of ideas could 

give rise to such an expression. We would not like to think so 

ill of the natives as to combine the two expressions and draw a 

conclusion on that basis. 

Going on to the question of tlie zeks' language, we find ourselves 

in somewhat of a quandary. Without even mentioning the 

fact that each study of a newly discovered language always calls 

for a separate book and a special scientific course, there are 

specific difficulties in our case. 

One of them is the . . .' agglomerative combination of lan- . 

guage with cursing, to which w~ have already referred. No one 

could possibly separate them (because one cannot divide a living 

thing!) .18 But at the same time, we are restrained from setting 

down everything as it is in these scholarly pages out of concern 

for the morals of our young people. 

There is another difficulty-the necessity of precisely distinguishing 

the language of the zek people from the language of 

the tribe of cannibals (otherwise known as the "thieves," the 

crooks) scattered among them. The language of the tribe' of 

caimibals is'a completely separate branch of the philological tree, 

,which has nothing like it or akin to it. This subject is worthy of 

a separate inquiry, and we would only be confused by the incomprehensible 

cannibal lexicon (with such words as: "ksiva" 

-a document; "m~ochka"-handkerchief; "ugol"-suitcase; 

"lukovitsa"-a watch,; or "prokhorya"-boots). But the problem 

is that there are other lexicographical elements of the cannibal 

16. Only recently a certain Stalevskaya from the vil1llp, of Dolgoderevenskoye 

of Chelyabinsk Province found a way: "Why dicl Y9U not struggle for the 

purity of the language? Why did you not appeal to the In8tl'MCtB, lor help in 

an organiud way?" This remarkable idea simply never.c:roseil.~ iDinds when 

we were in the Archipelago; otherwise we would certsinlil bave.~ it to 

the zeks. '.' .. _ 

530 I THE 'GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

language which have been taken over by the zek language and 

which have enriched it with their images: 

"Svistet," meaning in Russian "to whistle, to smg," and in 

the zek language "to tell a lie, to shoot the bull"; "temnit," meaning 

in Russian "to darken, to obscure," and similarly in zek "to 

deceive, to confuse"; "raskidyvat chernukhu," meaning in Russian 

"to cast something black over," and in zek, similarly, "to 

deceive, to throw dust in one's eyes"; "kantovatsya," meaning in 

Russian "to,be tipped over, turned upside down," and in zek "to 

loiter, loaf on the job, but slyly"; "lukatsya," meaning in RuSsian 

"to feel out," and in zek "to check out the action-but swiftly"; 

"filonit," meaning in zek "to be clever, to loaf'; "mantulit," which 

used to mean in Russian "to lick the plates' of the master's table," 

and which now means in zek "to get stuck in, to slave away"; 

. "tsvet," meaning in Russian "color," including skin color, and in 

zek "appertaining, belonging, to the Russian thieves' law"; "polusvet," 

meaning in Russian "half-breed, mulatto," and in zek "half- _ 

thief'; ·"dukhovoi," meaning in Russian "pertaining to the spirit" 

or "wind," as is wind instrument, and in.zek "courageous, fearless, 

reckless"; "kondei," meaning in Russian and in zek "the cooler, 

the punishment block"; "shmon," meaning in zek "a frisk, a body 

search"; "kostyl," meaning "a crutch" in Russian, and in zek "the 

bread ration"; "fitiI," meaning "a wick" in Russian, and in zek 

"a prisoner worn down and dying"; "shestyorka," meaning in 

Russian something with "siX elements" or scoring "six points," 

and in zek "someone working for the camp administration or for 

the thieves or trusties"; "sosalovka," meaning in Russian "something 

sucked on or which sucks," and in zek "a starvation situation"; 

"otritsalovka," meaning in ~usian "something which is 

a denial, a disclaimer," and in zek "a rejection of everything 

demanded by the camp chiefs," usually on the part of the central 

hard core of thieves; "s pontom," meaning in Russian ''with the 

style of a card player who plays against the bank," and in zek 

very much the same, "bluffing but with braggadocio, with 

theatrics"; "gumoznitsa," meaning in zek "a prostitute; a camp 

lay"; "shalashovka," de.rived from the Russian "shaIaslJ," meaning 

"a lean-to shelter, a shack," and meaning in zek "a shack-up, 

a girl friend"; "batsiIly," meaning in :Russian "bacilli," and in zek 

"fats and oils"; "khilyat pod blatnogo," meaning in zek "to imitate 

the ways of the Russian thieves"; "zablatnitsya," meaning in zek 

"to take up the ways of the Russian thieves."


Many of these words, one must admit, possess precision, vividness, 

even a general comprelu:nsibility. Their crowning glory, 

however, is the shout "Na tsirlakh!" This can be translated into 

RUssian onlyby a complex description. To run J'r to serve sometJting 

!'na tsirlakh" means: "on tiptoe, and headlong, and with 

heartfelt zeal and eagerness"-and all of it simultaneously. 

Now it seems clear to us that the contemporary Russian language 

is in real need of this expression-particularly because 

action of that kind is often encountered in life. 

But such concern . . . is already, in fact, superfluous. The 

author of these lines, having completed his lengthy scientific 

journey through the Archipelago, was extremely worried about 

being able to return to his teaching in the ethnographic institut.e 

-not merely as regards his security clearance, but also as to 

whether he had fallen behind contemporary Russian language 

and whether the students' would understand him all right. And 

suddenly, then and there, with astonishment and delight, he 

heard from the first-year students the very same expressions his 

ears had grown used to in the Archipelago and in which the 

Russian language had been so deficient till now:"s khodu," 

gnina~m "right away" or "with a rush". or "crashing on"; 

"vsyu dorogu," meaning "all the'way, all the time"; "po novoy," 

meaning "once again"; "raskurochit," meaning "to rob, to clean 

out"; "zanachit," meaning "to stash, to swipe"; "frayer," meaning 

"a sucker" or "anyone not belonging to the thieves', law"; 

"durak i ushi kholodnye,". meaning literally "a fool with cold 

ears-a. hundred percent fool"; "ona s- parnyami shyotsya," 

meaning literally "she gets herself sewed up with the boys, she 

makes out with the boys"; and many, many others! 

What this indicates is the great energy of the zek language, 

which helps it to filter inexplicably into our country and first 

of all into the language of our young people. This offers the hope 

that in the future the process will accelerate and that all the 

words enumerated previously will also flow into the Russian 

language and will perhaps even be an ornament to it. 

But this makes the task of the researcher even more difficult: 

to separate the Russian language and the uk ,language. 

And then, too, conscientiousnesS prevents our bypassing a 

fourth difficulty: some primary and sort of prehistoric influence 

of the Russian language itself on the zek language, and even on 

the language of the cannibals (although now such an influence 

532 THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

cannot be observed). How otherWise can it be explained that we 

find in Dal'~ dictionary analogie$ to such specifically Archipelago 

expressions: '" . 

"zflit zakonom": literally "to live in the law," and meaning (in the 

Kostroma district) "to live with a wife" (in the Archipelago: "to 

live with her in the law"). 

"vy,;achit": "to fish out of a pocket," in the Russian peddlers' language. 

(And in the Archipelago they switched the prefix: ''zanachit,'' 

"to steal.") . 

"podkhodit" meant "to become impoverished, to become fagged out." 

(Compare "dokhodit" in the Archipelago, "to get fagged out to the 

p'!int of death, to be a ~ying man, a last-legger.") 

Or one can consider the proverbs colljlCted by Dal as well: 

''Cabbage SO\lP is good people"-and a whole series of island expressions: 

"moroz chelovek," meaning "a frost person," if he is not strong; 

"koslyor chelovek," literally "a bonfire person," etc. 

And we also find in Dal: "He doesn't catch mice."17 

And the word "suka" ("bitch") meant'a "spy" or "stoolie" back 

in the times of P. F. Yakubovich. ..' . 

And then there is that remarkable expression of the natives 

"to dig your horns in" (referring to every kind of work stubbornly 

executed and in general to all stubbormiess, to standing 

up for yourself). And then too: "to knock his hornS down" or 

"to knock his horns of/," which restores to contemporary life 

precisely the ancient Russian aad Slavonic meaning of the worp 

"homs"-conceit, haughtiness, disdain---despite the phrase borrowed 

and translated from the French, "put horns on" someone 

---describing a wife's unfaithfulneSS-:-a' phrase which never 

caught on among the 'ordinary people and which even the Russian 

intelligentsia would have forgotten had it not been bound 

up with Pushkin's duel. . . 

And all these innumerable difficulties force us for the time 

being to put off the linguistic portion of our inquiry. 

In conclusion, a few personal lines. The zeks· at first shied 

away from th~. author of this 'essay when he' questioned them; 

17. Dat, op. cit .. p. 357,


they supposed that these inquiries were being conducted for the 

benefit of the "godfather" (a guardian spiritually close to them; 

to whom, however, as to all their guardians, they are ungrateful 

and unjust). When they became convinced that this was not the 

case, and after they had been plied with makhorka to smoke 

from time to time (they do not smoke expensive varieties), they 

adopted' a kindly attitude toward the researcher, disclosing their 

unspoiled inner natures. In some places they even began in a. 

friendly way to nickname the researcher "Dill Tomatovich'! IU).d 

in others "Fan Fanych." It has to be pointed out that patronymics 

are not employed at all in the Archipelago, and that therefore 

. this form of respectful address bore a humorous character. 

Simultaneously it expressed how inaccessible to their intellect 

was the meaning of this study.' 

The author considers that the present inquiry has succeeded 

and that his hypothesis has been fully proved, namely, that in 

the middle of the twentieth century a completely new nation,has 

been discovered, unkIlown to anyone before; with the ethnic scope 

of many millions of people .. 

Chapter 20 

• 

The. Dogs' Service 

The title of this chapter was not intended as an intentionally' 

scathing insult, but it is our duty. to uphold the camp tradition. 

H you think about it, they themselves chose this lot: their service 

is, the same as that of guard dogs, and their service is connected 

with dogs. And there even exists a special statute on service with 

dogs, and there are whole officers' committees which monitor the 

work of an individual dog, fostering a good ·viciousness in the 

dog. And if the maintenance of one pup for a year costs the 

people 11,00(> pre-Khrushchev rubles (police dogs are fed better 

than prisoners),1 then the maintenance of each officer must cost 

even more. 

A.I;ld then throughout this book we have also had the difficulty 

of knowing what to call them in general. "The administration," 

"the chiefs," are too generalized and relate to freedom as well, 

to the whole life of the whole country, and they are shopworn 

terms anyway. "The bosses"-likewise .. "The camp managers"? 

But this is a circumlocution that only demonstrates our im-• 

. potence. Should ·they be Ramed straightforwardly in accordance 

with camp tradition? That would seem' crude, profane. It would 

be fully in the spirit of the language to call them.lagershchiki 

"camp keepers"; this distinguishes them every bit as well from the 

"lagernik"-"camp inmate"-as does ''tyuremshchik''-''prison 

keeper"-from "tyuremnik"-"prison inmate." And it expresses 

an exact and unique sense: those who manage and govern the 

1. AU this about the dogs comes from Metter's novella "Murat," Novy Mir. 

No.6,196O. 

534

The Dogs' Service I 535 

camps. And so, asking forgiveness of my stricter readers for this 

new word (and it is not entirely new if a vacant spot was left for 

it in the language), I shall from now on make use of it from time 

to time. 

And that is what this chapter is about: the "camp keepers" 

(and the "prison keepers" with them). We could begin with the 

. generals-and it would be a marvelous thing to do--but we 

don't have any material. It was quite impossible for us worms and 

slaves to leam about them and to see them close up. And when 

we did see them, we were dazzled· by the glitter of gold braid 

and couldn't make anythil}g out. 

So we really know nothing at all about the chiefs of Gulag 

who followed one another in turn-those tsars of the Archipelago. 

But if we come across a photo of Berman or a word or two of 

Apeter, we-seize on it immediately. We know about those 

"Garanin executions"-but of Garanin himself we 'know nothing. 

All we do know is that he was not satisfied· with simply signing; 

when he went around tlie camps, he. was not loath· to empty his 

Mauser into whatever mug he took a dislike to. We have written 

about Kashketin-but we never saw that Kashketin face to face. 

(.Thank God!) We managed to collect a little material on 

Frenkel, but not on Zavenyagin. He, the recently deceased, 

escaped being buried with the henchmen of Yezhov and Beria. 

And the newspaper hacks wrote of him: "the legendary builder 

of NoriIsk"! Did he lay bricks with his own hands? Realizing, 

however, that from up--above Beria loved him dearly and that 

from down below him the MVD man Zinovyev spoke highly of 

him, we suppose he was an out-and-out beast. Otherwise he would 

not have built Norilsk. As for Antonov, the chief of the Yenisei 

Camp, we can be grateful that the engineer Pobozhy described 

him for us. 2 And we would advise everyone to read this portrayal: 

the unloading of lighters on the Taz River. Ip the depths of the 

tundra ,where the railroad has not yet extended. (Will it ever?) 

Egyptian ants are dragging locomotives across the snow, and up 

above, Antonov stands on· a hill, watching OVer everything and 

setting tpem: a time limit for unloading. He flew in by air and he is 

about to fly out by air immediately. His whole retinue dances 

around him. Napoleon had nothing like this-and his personal 

.",. 

2. Novy Mlr, No.8, 1964. 


cook sets fresh tomatoes and cucumbers on a folding table right 

before him, in the midst of the Arctic permafrost. And the sonof-a-bitch 

shares with no one, shoving the whole lot into his own 

belly. 

'. 

In this chapter we are going to cOver those from colonel down. 

We'll chat a little about the officers ~d then go on to the 

sergeants, briefly cover the infantry guard-and that will be it. 

Let anyone who has noted more than we did write down more. 

Our limitation is this: when you are confined in prison or in 

camp, the personality of the prison keepers interests you only to 

the extent that it helps you evade their. threats and exploit their 

weaknesses. As far as anything else is concerned, you couldn't 

care less. They are unworthy of your attention. You are suffering 

yourself, and those around you who .are unjustly imprisoned are 

suffering, and in comparison with that sheaf of silfe~gs, which 

is too much for your outspread hands to encompass, what are 

. these stupid people in their watchdog jobs to you? What are 

their petty interests to you,· their worthless likes and dislikes, their 

successes and failures in the service? 

And then later, too late, you suddenly realize that you didn't 

observe them closely enough. 

Without even discussing the question of talent, can a person 

become a jailer in prison or camp if he is capable of the very 

least kind of useful activity? Let us ask: On the whole, can a 

camp keeper be a good human being? What system of moral 

selection does life arrange for them? The first selection takes 

place on assignment to the MVD armies, MVD schools, or MVD 

courses. Every man with the slightest speck of spiritual training, 

with a minimally circumspect conscience, or capacity to distinguish 

good from evil, is instinctively going to back out and 

use every available means to avoid joining this dark legion. But 

let us concede that he did not succeed in backing out. A second 

selection comes during training and the first service assignment, 

when the bosses themselves take a close look and eliminate all 

those who manifest laxity (kindness) instead of strong will and 

firmness (cruelty and mercilessness). And then a third selection 

takes pl~ce over a period of many years: All those who had not 

visualized where and into what they were getting themselves now 

come to understand and are horrified. To be constantly a weapon 

of violence, a constant .participant in evil! Not everyone can bring

-- 

TheDogs' Service I 537 

himself to this, and certainly not right off. You 'see, you are 

trampling on others' lives. And inside yourself something tightens 

and bursts. You 'can't go on this way any longer! And although 

it is belated, men can still begin to fight their way out, report 

themselves ill, get disability certificates, accept lower pay, take' 

off their shoulder boards-anything just to get out, get out, get 

out! 

Does that mean the. rest of them have got used to it? Yes. The 

rest of them have got used to it, and their life already seems 

normal to them. And useful too, of course. And even honorable. 

And sotne didn't have to get used to it; they had beep. that way 

from the start. 

' 

Thanks to this process of selection one can conclude that the 

percentage of the merciless and cruel among the camp keepers 

is much higher than in a random sample of the population. And 

the longer, the more constantly, and the more notably ~ person 

serves in the Organs, the more likely it becomes that he is a 

scoundrel. 

We do not lose sight of the lofty words of Dzerzhinsky: "Whoever 

among you has become hardened, whose heart cannot 

respond sensitively and attentively to those who suffer imprisonment-get 

out of this institution!" However, we canp.ot relate 

these words in any way to reality. Who was this meant for? And 

how seriously? Considering that he defended' Kosyrev? (Part I, 

Chapter 8.) And who paid any attention to it? Neither "terror as 

a means of persuasion," nor arrests on the grounds of "unreliability," 

nor the .executions of hostages, nor those early concentration 

camps fifteen years before Hitler . . . give US the 

slightest feeling. of those sensitive hearts or those knights in 

shining anilor. And if some did leave the Organs themselves, 

on their own in those years, then the ones Dzerzhinsky invited 

to stay could not help but grow hardened. ~d whoever became 

hardened op-was hard to begin with stayed. (And maybe a different 

kind bf advice was given on another occasion, but we 

simply don't have the quotations.) 

How adhesive are those fashionable expressions which we 

are inclined to take over and use without ~inking or checking 

them! An old Chekist! Who has not heard/these 'Words, drawled 

with emphasis, as a mark of special esteem? If the zeb wish.'to 

distinguish a camp keeper ITom those who are inexperienced, 


inclined to fuss, who shout pointlessly and do not have a bulldog 

grip, they say: "ADd the chief there is an o-o-old Cheldst!" (Like 

- that major who burned Klempner's sonata about shackles.) The 

, Chekists themselves were the ones who put this term into circulation, 

and we repeat it without thinking. ~'An old Chekist" 

what that means at the least is that he was well regarded under 

Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria. He was useful to them all. 

But let us -not digress and begin to talk about "Chekists in 

general." There has already been one chaptet: in this book on 

Chekists in the specific sense, the Chekists of the Security 

.Operations-interrogation-gendarme 'persuasion. And the camp 

keepers merely like to call themselves Chekists, merely aspire to 

that title, or else have come here from those jobs for a rest-for a 

rest because here their nerves are not subject to such wear and 

tear and their health is not being. undermined. Their work here 

does not require of them either that degree of development 

or that active pressure of evil demanded- back there. In the 

Cheka-GB one must be sharp and quick and invariably hit the 

eye, but _ in the MVD it is enough to be dull and not miss the 

whole skull. 

To our chagrin, we cannot undertake to explain why the slogan 

"the 'proletarianization' and the 'Communization' of camp personnel,"s 

which was successfully carried out, did not create in the 

Archipelago that fluttering love of man according to Dzerzhinsky. 

From the very earliest revolutionary years, in courses in the 

Central Penal Department-and the provincial penal departments, 

the junior administrative staff (in other worils, the internal 

custodial staff) trained for prisons and camps "without interrupting 

work" (in other words, on ~he job, already in prisons and 

camps). By 1925 only 6 percent of the Tsarist prison custodial 

staff remained (what hardened old servitors!). And even earlier 

the middle-rank camp command staff had become fully Soviet in 

composition. They continued to study: first at the law faculties 

of the People's Commissariat of Education (yes, the People's 

Commissariat of Education! And not faculties of lawlessness 

either, but of law!). From 1931 on these became the correctivelabor 

divisions of the law institutes of the People's Commissariat 

.} 

3. And by October, 1923, the number of them in the R.S.F.S.R. was already 

twelve thousand, and by January I, 1925, fifteen thousand. TsGAOR, collection 

393, shelf 39, file 48, sheets 4 and 13; shelf 53, file 141, sheet 4.

The Dogs' Service 

I 539 ' 

of Justice in Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, Saratov, and Irkutsk. 

The graduates were 70 percent workers in origin and 70 percent 

Communists! In 1928, by decree of the Council of People's 

Commissars and the never-objecting VTslK, the powers over the 

prison regimen of these "proletarianized" and "Communized" 

chiefs of plilces of confinement were expanded still more. 4 Just 

imagine! Love of man somehQw didn't happenl Many more 

millions of people suffered from them than from the Fascistsand 

they weren;t POW's either,. nor conquered· peoples, but • .'. 

their own compatriots, ott their own .native ·soil! . 

And who is going to explain that to us? We can't. ... 

Do a similarity of paths in life and a similarity of situations 

give rise to a similarity in characters? As a general thing it doesn't. 

. For people with strong minds and spirits of their own it does not. 

They have their own solutions, their own special traits, and they 

can be very surprising. But among the camp keepers, . who have 

passed through a severe negative-selection process-both in. 

morality and mentality-the similarity is astonishing, and. we 

can, in all likelihood, describe without difficulty their basic universal 

characteristics. 

A"ogance. The camp chief lives on a separate island, flimsily 

connected with the remote external power, and·on this island he . 

. is without qualification the. first: all the zeks are abjectly subordinate 

to him, and all the free-employees too. He has the biggest 

star on his shoulder boards of any there. No limits are set to his 

power, and it admits to no mistakes; every person complaining 

is always proven wrong (repressed). He has the best hoUse on the 

island. The best means of transportation. The camp keepers immediately 

below him in rank are also raised extremely high. And 

since their whole preceding life has not given birth to any spark 

of critical capacity inside them, it is impossible for them to see 

themselves as other than a special race---of born rulers. Oui of 

the fact that no one is capable of resisting them, they draw the 

conclusion that they rule very wisely, that this is their talent 

("organizational"). Every day each ordinary event permits them 

visibly to observe their superiority: people rise before them, stand 

at attention, bow; at their summons people do not just approach 

4. Vysbillsky, op. cil., p. 421. 


but run up.to them; on their orders people do not simply leave 

but run out. And if he (Dukelsky of BAMlag) walks to the gates 

to watch the dirty rabble of his workers marching in a column 

surrounded by police dogs, he is the very image of a plantation 

owner-in a snow-white suriuner suit. And if they (Unzblag) have 

taken it into their heads that they would like to ride out on 

horseback t

The Dogs' Service I ·541 

emerged from our MVD men, and no one ever will. And the 

main thing was that the serf owners either governed their estates 

themselves or at least understood a tiny little part of their estate 

operation. But the presumptuous MVD officers, with aU kinds of 

etat~ benefits showered on t1tem, just could not take on themselves 

the additional burden of business management.· They were 

too lazy for that and too stupid. And they wrapped their inane 

jdleness in a fog of severity and secrecy. And, as it turned out, 

the state6 was compelled to erect, alongside their whole gOldshoulder-boarded 

hierarchy, a second such hierarchy out of the 

trusts and combines.s . 

Autocracy. Autotyranny. In this respect the camp keepers, 

were fully the equals of the . very worst of the serf owners of 

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Innumerable are· the 

examples of senseless orders, the sole purpose of which was to 

demonstrate their power. And the farther into Siberia and the 

North they were, the truer this was.· But even in Khimki, just 

outside Moscow (today it's in Mo~ow), Major Volkov noticed . 

on May 1 that the zeks were not cheerful. And he issued orders: 

"Everyone must cheer up immediately! Anybody I see unhappy 

will go oft to the punishment block!" And to joUy up the engineers 

he sent ttmd-termer girl thieves to sing them obscene ditties. 

People will say this was not tyranriy but a "political measure, so 

all right. They brought. a prisoner transport to that same camp~ 

One of the newcomers, Ivanovsky, was presented as a ,dancer of 

the Bolshoi Theatre. "What? A performer?" Volkov raged. 

''Twenty days in the punishment block! Go by yourself and report 

to the chief of the penalty isolator!" After some time had 

passed he telephoned: "Is the performer there?" "He is." "Did 

he come on his own?" "He did." "Well, then, let him outl I am 

appointing him assistant to the Commandant." (And that same 

Volkov, as we have already mentioned, .ordered a woman's head 

shaved because she had beautiful hair.) 

The surgeon Fuster, a Spaniard, did not play up to the camp 

chief. "Send him to the stone q1Jal'lj'." They did. Soon afterward 

the camp chief himself fell ill and needed an operation. There 

S. The state is by no means always directed from the summit, as history well 

understands; it is very of len tbe middle layer tbat, by its inertia, bas determined 

the nondevelopment of the state. 

6. But this didn't surprise anyone; wbat is there in our country, after all, 

which is not duplicated, beginning witb the very power of the Soviets itself? 


were other surgeons, and he could have gone to a central Moscow 

hospital, but no, he had faith only in Fuster! Bring him back 

from the quarry! "You are going to operate on me!" (But he died 

under the knife. ) 

And one camp chief made a real find: It turned out that a 

zek geological engineer, Kazak, possessed an operatic tenor 

voice. Before the Revolution he had- studied in Petersburg with 

the Italian teacher Repetto. And the camp chief also discovered 

that he himself had a voice. It was 1941-1942 and the war was 

going on somewhere, but the camp chief was well protected 

from military service by his exemption, and he took singing 

lessons from his serf. The latter was sickly and dying, and was 

making inquiries in an effort to locate his wife, while his wife, 

O. P. Kazak, in exile, was trying to find her husband through 

Gulag. The search documents came together in the chiefs hands, 

and he could have helped them re-establish communication. 

However, he did not do .!his. Why not? He "reassured" Kazak that 

his wife had been exiled but was living well. (Formerly a teacher, 

she worked first as a charwoman in the Grain Procurements 

Office and subsequently on a collective farm.) And he continued 

to take his singing lessons. And _when, in 1943, Kazak was at 

death's door, the camp chief spared him, helped to get him released 

because of illness, and let him go tohis wife to die. (So he 

was not really a vicious chief!) 

A sense of possessing a patrimonial estate was typical of all 

camp chiefs. They perceived their camp not as a part of some 

state system but as a patrimonial estate entrusted them indivisibly 

. for as long as they occupied their positions. Hence came all the 

tyranny over lives, over personalities, and hence also came the 

bragging among themselves. The chief of one of the Kengir 

camps said: "I've got a professor working in the baths!" But the 

chief of another camp, Captain Stadnikov, put him down with 

"And in my camp I've got an academician barracks orderly who 

carries out latrine barrels." 

Greed and money-grubbing. Among the camp keepers this was 

the--most widespread trait of all. Not every one was stupid, and 

not everyone was a p~ty tyrant-but every last one was engaged 

in attempting to enrich himself from the free labor of the zeks 

and from state property, whether he was the chief in that camp 

or one of his aides. Neither I nor anyone of my friends could

The Dogs' Service . I 543 

recollect any disinterested camp keeper, nor have any of the zeks 

who have been correspoD9ing wit1lme ever named ·one. 

In their greed to grab as much as possible, none of their 

multitudinous legitimate monetary advantages and privUeges 

could satisfy them. Neither high pay (with qoublti and triple 

bonuses for work "in the Arctic," "in remote areas," "for dangerous 

work"). Nor prize money (provided ~anagement executives 

of camp by Article 79 of the Corrective Labor Code of 1933- 

that same code that did not hinder. them from establishing' a' . 

twelve-hour workday without any Sun!:lays for the prisoners) . Nor 

the exceptionally advantageous calculation of their seniority (in 

the North, where half the Archipelago was located~ one year of 

work counted as two, and the total required for "military personnel" 

to earn a pension was twenty years; thus an MVD 

officer on completing MVD school at age· twenty-~o coula 

. retire on a full pension and go to live at Sochi at thirty-two!). 

No! Yet every channel, meager or abundant, through which 

free services, food products, or objects could tlowwliSalways 

used by every camp keeper graspingly and 'gulpingly. ;Even back 

on Solovki the ·chiefs had begun to expropriate cooks, laundresses, 

stable boys, woodcutters from among the prisoners. And 

froll) then on there was never any end to (and. from up abo:ve 

never any prohibition against) this profitable custom. So the 

camp keepers also took for themselves cattle herdsmen, gardeners, 

or teachers for their children. And in the years of the most 

litrident outcry about equality and socialism, in 19.33, for ex~ 

ample, any free employee in BAM1~, for a minuscule payment to 

the camp cashier. could acquire a personal servant from among 

the prisoners. In Knyazll-Pogost "Aunt" Manya Utkina looked 

after the cow of the camp chief-and for this was rewarded with 

a glass of milk per day. And under. the Gulag way of life this was 

real generosity.' (And it would .have been. more likely in the 

Gulag way of life for that cow not to belong to the cItief, but to be 

kept for "improving the diet of the sick"-but the milk would 

have kept on going to the chief.) 

Not by the glass either, but by the pailful and the bagful. everyone 

who could possibly get fed off the rations of the prisoners 

did so on' principle! Read over, dear reader, Lipai's letter in 

'Chapter 9 above, the outcry, one would gather, of a former 

storeroom clerk. After all, it was not out of hunger, not out of 

S44 


need, not out of poverty that those Kuragi!ls, those Posuishapkas, 

those Ignatchenkos hauled out bags and barrels from the storeroom, 

but very simply thus: Why shouldn't they enrich themselves 

at the expense of the mute, defenseless, starving slaves? (And 

all the more so during wartime, when everyone else around was 

grabbing. Anyway, if you didn't live that way, everyone would 

laugh at you! I am not even going to make a special issue here 

of their betrayal of trusties who used to catch it because of the 

shortages.) And the Kolyma prisoners remember: Whoever was 

in a position to steal from the common food pot of the prisoners 

~ht- camp chief, the chief of regimen, the chief of the Cultural 

and Educational Section, the free employees, the duty jailersall 

invariably stole. And the gatehouse guards . . . swiped sweetened 

tea at the gatehouse! Even just a spoonful of sugar, just so 

as to eat off the prisoners. What you take from a dying man is 

sweeter .... 

. The ohiefs of the Cultural and Educational Sections are best 

not recalled. They were a big laugh. They all swiped, but it was 

all small-scale stuff (they were not permitted anything bigger). 

The chief of the KVCh would summon the storeroom clerk and 

give him a bundle-a pair of tattered cotton padded britches, 

wrapped up in a copy of Pravda. "Take. them and bring me some 

new ones." And the chief of the KVCh in 1945-1946 at the 

Kaluga Gates Camp used to carry out of the compound a bundle 

of bits of firewood, gathered for him by the zeks on the construc 

·tion project; (And he went through Moscow on a bus ... in a 

greatcoat and with a bundle of bits of firewood-his wasn't such 

a sweet life either .... ) 

It was not enough for the camp bosses that both they and their 

families were clothed and shod by the camp craftsmen. (And 

once a special costume fora masquerade ball, a ~'dove of peace," 

was made {or the fat wife of'one camp chief in the camp workshops.) 

It was not enough for them that they had their own 

furniture manufactured there, as well as all other kinds of household 

supplies. It was not enough that they even had their shotgun 

pellets cast there (for poaching in the nearby game preserve). 

It was not enough for them that their pigs were fattened by the 

camp kitchen. It" was too little! They were distinguished from 

the old serf owners because their power was not for a lifetime 

and not hereditary. And because of this difference the serf owners


did not have to steal from themselves, but the camp keepers had 

their heads occupied with one thing-how to steal something 

from their own enterprise. 

I am sparing with ex'amples so as not to encumber the exposition. 

The sullen hunchback Nevezhin never left our camp at the 

Kaluga Gates with empty hands, but used to walk out, just like 

that, in his long officer's greatcoat, carrying either a pail of linseed 

oil, or windowpanes, or putty, and all of it in quantities a thousand 

times exceeding the needs of any single family. And a 

paunchy captain, the chief of Camp 15 on Kotelnichesky Embankment, 

used to come each week in his passenger car for linseed 

oil and putty. (In postwar Moscow these were gold!) And 

, all this had previously been stolen for them from the construction 

zone and taken into the camp compound-by those same zeks 

who had received ten years for a sheaf of straw or a packet of 

nails! But we Russians had long since been reformed, and 'become 

accustomed to how things were in our Motherland; and to us 

this only seemed funny. But here is how it was with the German 

POW's in the Rostov Camp! At night the chief of camp sent them 

to steal construction materials for him; he and the other chiefs 

were building houses for themselves. What could these submissive 

Germans make out of all this--when they knew that this same 

camp chief had had them court-martialed for ,taking a pot of 

potatoes and sentenced to ten or twenty-five years? The Germans 

figured it out: They went to the woman interpreter S. and supplied 

her with a document justifying their act, a declaration that 

on a certain date they were going to be compelled to go and ste~l. 

(And what they were building was railroad facilities, and becauSe 

of the constant stealing of cement these were being built almost 

entirely of sand.) 

Pay a visit nowadays to the home of the chief of the mine 

administration in Ekibastuz, D. M. Matveyev. (He is now in 

the mine administration because of the curtailment of, Gulag, but 

he was, chief of the Ekibastuz Camp from 1952 on.) His home is 

filled with paintings, carvings, and other things made for him 

for free, by the hands of natives. 

Lasciviousness. This was not true of each and every one of 

them, of course, and it was closely tied to individual physiology. 

But the situation of camp chief and the absoluteness of his rights 

allowed harem inc~ations full sway. The chief of the Burepolom 


, ' 

Camp, Grinberg, had each comely young woman brought to 

him immediately on ,arrival. (And what othe~ choice did she 

have except death?) In Kochmes the camp chief Podlesny enjoyed 

nighttime roundups'in the women's barracks (of the same 

sort we have already seen in Khovrino). He himself personally 

pulled the blankets off the women, allegedly searching for hidden 

men. In the presence of ,his beautiful wife he simpltaneously 

bedded three zek mistresses. (And one day, having shot one of 

them out of jealousy, he shot himself.) Filimonov, the chief of 

the Cultural and Educational Department of all Dmitlag, was 

removed "for moral corruption" and senno be reformed (in the 

very same position) to BAMlag. There he continued his heavy 

drinking and fornication on a formidable scale, and he promoted 

his mistress from the nonpolitical offenders . . .' to be the chief 

of the Cultural and Educational Section. (His son, incidentally, 

joined up with some bandits and very soon afterward was himself 

imprisoned for banditry.) 

Malice, cruelty. There was no curb, either practical or moral, 

to restrain these traits. Unlimited power in the hands of limited 

people always leads to cruelty. (And we cite here all this 

similarity in vices to those of the serf owners not merely for 

eloquent argument,.. This similarity, alas, demonstrates that the 

nature of our compatriots has not changed in the slightest in two 

hundred years; give as much power as that and there will be all 

the same vices!) 

Tatyana Merkulova, a woman-beast, at the women's logging 

Gamp No. 13 of Unzhlag, rode on her horse among her female 

slaves like a savage plantation owner. Major Gromov, according 

to the recollections of Pronman, was actually ill on any day he 

had not imprisoned several prisoners in the punishment block. 

Captain Medvedev (Camp No.3 of UstVymIag) stood in the 

watchtower himself for several hours each day and jotted down 

the names,of the men who had gone into the women's barracks 

in order to follow up by imprisoning-them. He loved always to 

have a full isolator. If the cells of the 'isolator were not packed 

full, he felt something laCking in his life. In the evening he loved' 

to line up the zeks and read them such statements as "You have 

lost the game! There is never going to be any return to freedom 

for any of you, and don't dare to hope there will be." In that 

very same UstVymIag the chief of 'Camp ¥inakov (a former

,.,. 


deputy chief of the Krasnodar Prison, who had served two y~ 

for exceeding his power in that prison, and who hll;d already been 

readmitted to the Party) personaIlyhauled from their bunks' 

prisoners who refused to go out to work. Among th!!m were 

thieves who began to put up a ~esistance, to brandish boards at 

him; and at that poin~ he ordered all the window frames taken 

out of the barracks (at 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit), and 

then he ordered pailfuls of water to be poured in through them. 

All of them (including the natives) knew that the telegraph 

lines stopped here! The plantation owners also developed anger 

with a twist, in other words, what is called sadism. A prisoner 

transport was lined up in front of Shulman, the chief of the 

special section of Burepolom. He knew that this transport was 

going right out to general work. Nonetheless he could not deny 

himself the satisfaction of asking: "Are there any engineers? 

Raise your hands!" A dozen hands were raised above faces shining 

with hope. "Ah, so that's how it is! And maybe there are 

some academicians? Pencils will be brought you immediately!" 

And they brought in ... crowbars. The chief of the Vilna colony, 

Lieutenant" Karev, saw among the newcomers Junior Lieutenant 

Belsky (still in officer's boots and a tattered officer's uniform). 

Not long before, this person had been just such a Soviet officer 

as Karev, had worn just such .shoulder boards. Did the sight of 

this tattered uniform .arouse sympathy in Karev? Did he, at least, 

maintain an attitude of indifference? No, there was the desire to 

single him out for humiliation! And he ordered that Belsky 

(exactly as he was, without changing his uniform for camp 

clothing) be put to hauling manure to the vegetable garden. In 

that same colony high-ranking executives of the Lithuanian Administration 

of C0rI'ect!ve Labor Camps came to the bath and lay 

down on the benches and and gave orders they be washed, not 

just by prisoners but by 58's only. 

Well, just look at their faces. After all, they are still going 

about among us today. They may well turn out.to be next to us 

in a train (though not in anything less than a first-class compartment). 

Or in a plane. They have a wreath in their lapel buttonhole, 

though what the wreath crowns it is impossible to say, and, 

it is true enough, their shoulder boards are no. longer sky-blue 

(they are shy), but the piping is blue, or even red, or maroon. 

An oaken cruelty is etched into their faces, and they always have 


a gloomy, dissatisfied expression. It would· seem as if everything 

was gomg well in their lives,. but there is that expression of dis:. 

satisfaction. Perhaps they have the feeling that they are missing 

out on something better? Or perhaps God has marked them out 

in!allibly for all their evildoings? On the Vologda, Archangel, 

and Urals trains, in first-class compartments the percentage of_ 

this kind of military is higher. Outside the window shabby camp 

watchtowers loom. "Is that your establishment?" asks a neighbor. 

The military man nods his head affirmatively, and says in a satisfied, 

even proud, way: "Ours." "Is that where you are going?" 

"Yes." "And does your wife work there too?" "She gets 90. Yes, 

and I get 250 myself. [This means he's a major.] Two children. 

You'll not get far on that." Now this one here, for example, even 

has city manners, and is a very pleasant person to talk to on the 

train. Collective-farm fields have flashed past, and he explains: 

''In agriculture things are going along much better. Nowadays 

they sow whatever they want to." (And when for the first time 

men clambered out of their caves to plant crops on a burned-over 

spot in the forest, did they not sow ''whatever they wanted to"?) 

In 1962 I traveled through Siberia on a trai~ for the first 

time as a free man. And it just had to happen! In my compartment 

there was a young MVD man, just graduated from the 

Tavda school, traveling under orders from the Irkutsk Administration 

of Corrective Labor Camps. I pretended to be a sympathetic 

idiot, and he told me how they went through probationary 

work in contemporary camps, and how impudent, feelingless, and. 

hopeless the prisoners were. On his face there had not .yet set in 

that constant, permanent cruelty, but he triumphantly showed 

me a photo of the third graduating class at Tavda, in which there 

were not only boys-but also veteran camp keepers finishing 

up their education (in training dogs, in criminal investigation, in 

camp management and in Marxism-Leninism) more for the sake 

of their pensions than for the sake of service. And even though 

I had been around, nonetheless I exclaimed! Their blackness 

of heart stands out on their faces! How adroitly they pick them 

out from all humanity! 

In a POW camp in Ahtme, in Estonia, there was an incident. 

A Russian nurse became intimate with a German POW, and they 

were found out. Not only did they evict her forthwith from their 

noble midst. Oh, no! For this woman who wore Russian officer's


shoulder boards, they nailed together a plank booth with a tiny 

. window near the gatehouse outside the camp compound (they 

spared no work and effort on this). They kept her in this booth 

for a week, and every free employee on his way "to work," and 

on his return, would t1u:ow stones at the booth, and shout: "You 

German whore'" And spit at her. 

rhat is how they are chosen. 

Let us help history preserve the names of the Kolyma campkeeper 

butchers who (at the end of the thirties) knew no limits 

to their power and inventive cruelty: Pavlov, Vishnevetsky, Gakayev, 

Zhukov, Komarov, M. A. Kudryashev, Logovinenko, Merinov, 

Nikishov, Reznikov, Titov, Vasily ''Durovoi.'' Let us also 

recall Svetiichny, the famous torturer of Norilsk, responsible for 

the loss of many ze" lives. 

Others, without our help, will tell about such monsters as 

Chechev (dismissed from the MVD in the Baltic States and sent 

to be chlef of Steplag); Tarasenko (the chief of Usollag); Korotitsyn 

and Didorenko from Kargopollag; the fierce Barabanov 

(chief at· the end of the war at Pechorlag); the chief of regimen 

at PechZhelDoriag Smimov; Major Chepig (chief of regimen of 

Vorkutlag), Just a list of these famous names would take up 

dozens of pages. It is not for my lonely pen to pursue them all 

to the end. And they still have their former power. They have 

not yet set aside an office for me in which to gather an: these materials, 

Qr offered me broadcast facilities for appeals over the All 

Union radio networks. 

One thing more about Mamulov, and that will suffice. This 

is that same Mamulov of the Khovrino Camp whose brother was 

the chief of Beria's secretariat. When our armies had liberated 

half of Germany, many of the MVD big-shots rushed there, 

Mamulov ,among them~ From there he sent back whole trainloads 

of sealed cars-to his own Khovrino Station. The cars 

were shunted into the camp compound so that freerailtoad 

workers would not see what was in them--officially described as 

''valuable factory equipment"-and Mamulov's own zeks unloaded· 

them. No one cared whether they saw. Shoved in there, 

in b~ was everything that crazed looters grab: chandeliers 

ripped from ceilings, antique and ordinary furniture, table 

services wrapped up in wrinkled tablecloths, kitchen utensils, 

evening dresses and housedresses, woinen's and men's under- 

550 I THE GULAG ARCHIPE LAGO 

wear and linens, dress coats, silk hats, and even canes! Here all 

this was sorted out, and whatever remained whole was carried 

off to apartments and distributed among friends. Mamulov also 

brought from Germany a whole parking-Iotful of confiscated 

automobiles. He even gave his son an Opel Kadett, the son being 

twelve years old (the age of a camp kid!). For whole months 

long the tailor and shoemaker shops in camp were piled high 

with loot which had to be altered. Yes,.and Mamulov had more 

than one apartment in Moscow and more than one woman, too, 

whom he had to provide for! But his favorite apartment was in 

the suburbs, at the camp. Sometimes Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 

himself came here to visit. They brought out from Moscow a 

makeshift Gypsy chorus and even let two of the zeks in on these 

orgies-the guitarist Fetisov and the dancer Malinin (formerly 

from the Red Army Ensemble for Song and Dance). And they 

were warned: If you ever say a word anywhere, I'll.see to it you 

rot! Here is the kind of person Mamulov was: They were returning 

from a fishing trip and dragged their boat through the 

vegetable garden of some old man, trampling all over it. The old 

man, it seems, began to protest. And how did they reward him? 

Mamulov beat him up with his own fists to the point where the old 

man lay there, groaning into the ground. "It belongs to me, and 

for that they beat me," as the saying goes. 7 

But I feel that my tale is becoming monotonous: Does it 

seem that I am repeating myself? Or is it that we have already 

read about this here, there, and elsewhere? 

I hear objections! I hear objections! Yes, there were such individual 

facts .... But for the most part under Beria ... But 

why don't you give some of the bright examples? Just describe 

some of the good ones for us! Show us our dearly beloved 

fathers .... 

But no! Let those who saw them show them. I didn't see them. 

I have already deduced the generalized judgment that a camp 

keeper could not be a decent person--either he had to change 

direction or they got rid of him. Let us suppose for just one 

moment that a camp keeper decided to do good and to replace 

7. When Beria fell in 1953, Mamulov was in bad trouble, but not for long. 

because after all he did belong to the ruling elite. He came out unscathed and 

became one of the chiefs of the Moscow Construction Trust. Then he got into 

trouble again for black-marketing apartments. And once again he rose to the 

top. And by now it is ample time for him to be on a pension.


the currish regimen in his camp with one that was human~: 

Would he be allowed to? Would they permit it? Would they let. 

this happen? You might just as· well leave a samovar out in the 

frost to heat up. 

Now I am willing to accept certain things: There were "good" 

men who kept trying unsuccessfully to get out, who had. not yet 

left, but who were going to leave. For example, the director of 

a Moscow shoe factory, M.·Gerasimov, had his Party card taken 

from him, but they did not expel him from the Party. (This 

form of discipline did actually exist. ) And in the meantime 

where could they send him? To Ust-Vym to be a camp keeper. 

And they say that he was very unhappy and depreSsed in this 

position and was easy on the zeks .. In five months~ time he got 

out of the job and left. And this I ·can believe: that for those five 

months he was· good. And then, too, supposedly. in Ortau in 

1944 there was a camp chief named Smeshkowho was not known 

to have done anything bad-and he, too, was trying to get out 

of his job. In the Administration of the Northeastern Corrective 

Labor Camps the former pilot Morozov, section chief in 1946,. 

had a decent attitude toward the zeks, and for that he was in the 

. bad books of the administration. Or Captain Siverkin in Nyroblag 

was, they say, a decent man. And what came of that? They 

. sent him to Parma, a penalty-work party. And he had two occu- 

' .. pations there: he drank hooch and listened to the Western radio. 

In these localities the jamming was weak (1952). And then my 

neighbor in the railroad car, the Tavda gradu~te, he also 

possessed good impulses: There was a young fellow in the 

corridor who had no ticket and who had been standing a whole 

day. And so this fellow said: "Shall we make room for hinl,give 

him a place? Let him get some sleep?" But just give him a 

year's service as a chief, and he will do something else againhe 

will go to the conductor: "Get rid of that fellow without a 

ticket!" Isn't that rigflt? 

Well, I will speak honestly. I knew one verfgood MVD man 

-true, not a camp keeper but a jail keeper-Lieutenant Colonel 

Tsukanov .. * For a brief while he was the chief. of the Special 

Prison at Marfino. Not only I but all the zeks there admit that 

no one suffered evil and. all experienced good from him. Whenever 

he could bend the order in the zeks' favor ... he invariably 

. did. And whatever he could ease up on . . . he invariably did. 


And what happened? They reclassified our Special Prison into a 

stricter classification-and he was removed. He was not a young 

man and had served a long time in the MVD. And how he had 

done it 1 don't know. It is a riddle. 

And Arnold Rappoport assures me that Colonel of Engineers 

Mikhail Mitrofanovich Maltsev, an army field. engineer, who 

from 1943 to 1947 was chief of Vorkutlag-both the construction 

project and the camp-was, supposedly, a good man. 

In the presence of Chekists he shook the hands of zek engineers 

and addressed them politely. He could not stand career Chekists, 

and he held in contempt the chief of the Political Branch, Colonel 

Kukhtikov. And when he was commissioned with a State Security 

rank-General Commissar, Third Rank-he refused. (Can that 

be?) He said: "I am an engineer." And he got his way. He 

became an ordinary general. During the years of his administration, 

Rappoport assures me, not one single camp case was ever 

set in motion in Vorkuta. (And these, after all, were the war 

years, the very period for all those camp cases.) His wife was 

the prosecutor for the city of Vorkuta and succeeded in paralyzing 

the creative work of the camp security officers. This is a 

very important piece of evidence, if only A. Rappoport is not 

exaggerating involuntarily because of his own privileged position 

as an engineer at that time. Somehow I. find it hard to really 

believe it; why, then, did they not get rid of this Maltsev? After 

all, he must have been in everyone's way. Let us hope that someolle 

someday will establish the truth here. (Commanding a' 

division of field engineers at Stalingrad, Maltsev could summon 

a regimental commander in front of the line-up and shoot him 

himself. He was sent to Vorkuta in disfavor, but not for that, for 

something else.) 

In this and, in other similar cases faulty memory and extraneous 

personal impressions sometiqtes distort recollections. 

And when they speak about good men, cine wishes to ask: Good 

to whom'? To all? 

And former front-line officers were by no means an improvement 

as replacements for veteran MVD men. Chulpenyov bears 

witness that things got no better, but even worse, when an old 

camp dog was replaced, at the end of the war, by a front-line 

officer invalided out, like Regimental Commissar Yegorov. Understanding 

nothing at all of camp life, they issued careless,


superficial orders and then went out of the camp compound on 

a drinking spree with son;te broads, turning the camp over to the 

scoundrels from among the trusties. 

However, those who shout particularly loudly about "good 

Chekists" in camps-these being the loyalist ~ Communists-do 

not have in mind "good" in the seJJfla in which we 

understand it; they don't mean those who tried f0 Qeate a 

generally humane condition for all imprisoned there, at the cost 

of deviating from the savage instructions of Gulag. No, they 

. consider those camp keepers "good" who honestly carried out all 

the currish instructions, who tore to pieces and tormented the 

whole crowd of prisoners, but did favors for the former. Communists. 

(What breadth of view the loyalists havel They are 

always the heirs of universal human culture! ... ) 

There actually were, of course, sQch "good" camp keepers 

as these, and no few of them. For example, Kudlaty with his 

volumes of Lenin-wasn't -he such a one? Dy~ov tells about 

one, and here was his nobility: During a business trip to Moscow 

the chief of camp visited the home o( one of the orthodox Cemmunist 

prisoners -serving time in his camp, and retumed-aIid 

. immediately went right on carrying out all his currish duties. 

And General Gorbatov recalls a "good" Kolyma camp keeper: 

"People are accustomed to consider us some ~ort of monsters of 

cruelty, but this opinion is erroneous. We, too, enjoy cOQlmuni~ 

cating good news to a prisoner." (But the letter from Gorbatov's 

wife in which the passage where she warned him about the 

reconsiiieration of his case was blacked out by the censor-why 

did they deprive themselves of the enjoyment of communicating 

good n~wl? But Gorbatov sees no contradiction in this: the 

chiefs say it, and the army general believes it.) And what that 

"good" Kolyma cur was worried about . . . was that Gorbatov 

might say something "up top" about the tyranny in his camp. 

That was why that pleasant conversation took place. And at the 

very end: "Be careful in your conversations." (And Gorbatov 

again understood nothing at all .... ) 

And here in 11.vutiya (September 6, 1964) Levkovich writes 

a so-called passionate-but in our opinion assigned-article: 

She had known' several good, intelligent, strict, sad, tired.· etc., 

Chekists, and a certain Kapustin in Dzhambul had tried to 

arrange jobs for the e~ed wives of Communists and because of 

5S4_ I THE GULAG AllCHIPELAGO 

this was forced to shoot himseH. Now this is total delirium. Nonsense! 

The commandant is obliged to, 'arrange work for exiles, 

even by compulsion. And if he really did shoot himseH-what 

this means is that it was because he had either embezzled or got 

in a mess with some broads. But what was the central organ of 

the former VTsIK, lzvestiya (the very same that had approved 

of all the Gulag cruelties), trying to ptove? It was saying that if 

there wert some good serf owners, then there had never been 

any serfdom in' general .... 

Yes, and here is another "good" camp keeper: our Ekibastuz 

Lieutenant Colonel Matveyev. Under Stalin he showed and 

clacked his sharp teeth, but once Papa Stalin had died and Beria 

had had it-Matveyev became a leading liberal, the father of the 

natives! Well, until the next .change of wind anyway. (But on 

the quiet, even during that year, he instructed the brigadier AIeksandrov: 

"If someone doesn't obey you-punch him in the snoot. 

Nothing will hliPpen to you, I promise!") 

No, "good" men like that are "good" only until the wind 

changes! AIl that kind' of "good" men-are good and cheap! 

In 'our view they were good only when they theJDSelves served 

time in camp. 

And ... some did serve time. But what they were tried for was 

not for that. . 

• 

The camp custodial staff was considered the junior command 

staff of the ~. These were the Gulag noncoms. And that 

was the kind of assignment they had-to worry the prey and not 

let go. They were on the same Gulag ladder, only lower. As a 

result they had fewer rights and they had to use their own hands 

more often. However, they were not sparing of tl\eir hands, and 

if they were required to bloody someone up in the penalty isolator 

or in the jailers' room, three of them would boldly beat 

up on one even until they had knocked him out. Year by year 

they coarsened in the service, and you couldn't observe in them 

the least cloudlet of pi~ toward the soaked, freezing, hungry, 

tired, and dying prisoners. Iii relation to them the prisoners were 

just as deprived of rights, and just as defenseless, as in relation 

to the big chiefs. And they could bring pressure to bear on the 

prisoners in the same way-and feel themselves to be high up.


I SSS 

And they could vent their malice and display cruelty-they encountered· 

no barriers. And when you start beating with im- • 

punity-once you've started you don't want to stop. Tyranny. 

incites you and you feel yourself to be so ferocious that you are 

afraid even of yourself. The jailers willingly copied their officers 

in their conduct, and in character traits too-:-but they didn't 

have that gold on their shoulder boards and their greatcoats were 

dirtyish, and they went everywhere on foot, and they were not 

allowed prisoner-servants, and they dug in their own gardens, 

and looked after their own farm apimals. Well, of course, they 

did manage to haul off a zek to their places for half a day now 

and then.-to chop wood, to wash floors-this they could do, 

but not on a lavish scale. And not using the working zeks either, 

but those resting. (Tabaterov-in Berezniki in 1930-had only 

-just lain down after a twelve-hour night shift when the jailer 

awakened him and sent him to his house to work. And just try 

not to go! ... ) The jailers had no patrimonial estates,· the camp 

for them, after all, was not a patrimonial estate, but their service, 

and therefore they did not have either that arrogance or that 

despotic scope. And there were obstacles in the way of thieverytoo. 

This was an injustice; even without thievery the chiefs had 

plenty of money-and they could steal much too, and the 

custodial staff had much less--and were allowed to steal less 

too. No one was going to give yo~ a full bag from the storeroom 

-hardly even a small pouch. (Right now I can see before my 

eyes, as if it were today, the big-faced, flaxen-haired Sergeant 

Kisilyov; he came into the bookkeeping office in 1945 and 

ordered: "Don't issue one ounce of fats and oils to the zek 

kitchen! Only to the free employees!" There were not enough 

fats. And this was their whole advantage-fats according to the 

norm .... ) In order to have something sewn for them in the camp 

'tailor shop, they had to have the camp chiefs permission and 

wait their tum. Well, at work you could make the zek do a small 

task for you-solder, cook, hammer, or sharpen something. Anything 

larger than a stool you'd not always manage to carry out. 

This limitation on thievery deeply affronted the jailers, especially 

their wives, and because of this there was much bitterness against 

the chiefs, because of this iife seemed very unjust, and within 

the jailer's breast there stirred not so much sensitive heart strings 

as a sense of unfulfillment, an emptiness echoing a human groan. _ 

And sometimes the lower-ranking jailers were capable of talking 


sympathetically with the zeks. Not so often, but IW~ alfthilt rarely 

• either. In any case, among both prison ana camp j~lers it was 

possible to find human beings. Every prisoner encountered more 

than one in his career. In an officer it was virtually impossible. 

This, properly speaking, was the universal law of the inverse 

ratio between social position and humaneness. 

The real jailers were those who had served in camp fifteen 

and twenty-five years. Whoever had once settled down in those 

desr~ca distant places . . . would never be able to clamber out 

again. Once they had memorized the statute and daily routine, 

there was lWthing else in their whole lives that they had to read 

or know, and all they did was to listen to the radio, the Moscow 

program No. 1. And it was their corps that constituted for us 

the vacantly expressionless, unwavering face of Gulag, inaccessible 

to any thought. 

Only during the war years was the composition of the jailers' 

staff distorted and muddied. The military authorities in their 

haste disregarded the sanctity of the custodial service, and took 

some of them away to the front, and in place of them began to 

send soldiers from army units released from hospitals-but 

even from these they selected the stupidest and. cruelest. And 

old men turned up as well, mobilized straight here from home. 

And among these gray-mustached fellows were many goodhearted, 

unprejudiced people-they spoke gently, searched perfunctorily, 

confiscated nothing, and even joked. They never registered 

complaints nor reported people to be sent to the punishment 

cell. But after the war they were soon demobilized and 

there weren't any more of them. 

There were unusual individuals among the jailers (in wartime 

too) like the student Senin, about whom I have already written, 

and one other Jewish jailer in our camp at Kaluga Gates---elderly, 

with a very civilian appearance, very calm, not faultfinding, 

and no one suffered misfortune from ,him. He was so 

mild in his bearing that on one occasion I was bold enough to 

ask: "Tell me, what is your civilian profession?" He took not 

the slightest offense, looked at me with calm eyes, and quietly 

replied: "Merchant." During the war before coming to our camp 

he had served in Podolsk, where, as he related, thirteen or fourteen 

people had died every day of the war from starvation. (And 

, that alone makes twenty thousand deaths!) He evidently lasted


out the war in the "armies" of the NKVD, and now he had to be 

nimble and not get stuck there for good. 

But take Master Sergeant Tkach, the dreaded assistant to the 

chief of regimen of the Ekibastuz Camp, who fitted in with the 

jailers just as if he had been specially cast in a mold, as if from 

his diapers on he had served only there, as if he had been born 

along with Gulag. His was always an .immobile, ominous face 

beneath a. black forelock. It was frightening merely to be next 

to him or to run into him on a camp path; he would not walk. 

past without doing a person harm-ordering him to tum back, 

compelling him to work, taking something away from him; scaring 

him, punishing him, placing him under arrest. Even after the 

evening roll call, when the barracks were all locked but, in summertime, 

the.barred windows were left open, Tkach would creep 

silently up to the windows, listen there, then peer in-the whole 

room would. be rustling:-and from outside the windowsill, like 

a black bird of night, he would announce punishments through 

the grating: for not sleeping, for talking, for making or· using 

something forbidden. 

And all of a sudden . . . Tkllch disappeared for good. And 

the rumor swept through camp (it was impossible to check it out, 

nonetheless such persistel)t rumors as this were -usually. correct) . 

that he had been exposed as a Fascist executiont;r on occupied 

territOry, that he had been ·arrested and had received a· whole 

quart-twenty-five years. This was in 1952. 

How had it happened, however, that a Fascist executioner 

(for no more than three years, certainly) had for seven years 

after the war been in the best graces of the MVD? 

You tell me! 

• 

"The convoy opens fire without warning!'" This invocation encompassed 

the whole special statute of the convoys-and its 

power over us on the other side of the law . 

. 8, When we say "conllOY," we are using the everyday term of the Archi· 

peJaso; they used to say too, and even more often in the Corrective Labor 

Camps, the VOKhR-the Militarized Guards-or simply DKhR. Their full 

title was Militarized Guard Seniice of the MVD, and "convoy" was only one 

of the posib~ services of the VOKhR, along with service "on watch duty," 

''perimeter duty," "patrol duty," and "in battalion." 

558 I TH.E GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

Convoy service--even when there was no war-was like 

front-line service. The convoy had nothing to fear from any 

investigation, and did not have to give any explanations. Every 

convoy guard who fired was right. Every prisoner killed was 

guilty-of wanting to escape or of stepping across the line. 

Take two murders at the Ortau Camp. (And you can multiply 

them by the total number of camps.) A guard was leading a 

group under convoy, and a person not under convoy went up to 

his girl friend in the group and walked along beside her. "Move 

away!" "Is it doing you any harm?" A shot. Killed. A comedy 

of a trial, and the guard was acquitted: he had been insulted 

while carrying out service duties. 

At the gatehouse, a zek ran up to another guard with a release 

document (he was going to be released the next day) and 

asked: "Let me through, I am going to the laundry [outside the 

camp compound]. I'll only be a minute!" "You can't." "But tomorrow 

I'm going to be free, fool!" The guard shot him dead. 

Killed. And there wasn't even a trial. 

And how easy it was for a prisoner not to notice in the heat 

of his work those blazes on the mes which constituted an imaginary 

dotted line, a forest cordon instead of barbed wire. For example, 

. Solovyov (a former army lieutenant) cut down a fir 

tree and, moving backward, was cleaning the branches off it. 

He saw only his felled tree. And a.convoy guard, "a Tonshayevo 

wolf," squinted and waited. He wouldn't callout to the zek, 

"Watch out!" He just waited, and Solovyov, not notiging, 

crossed the line of the work zone, continuing to back his way 

down the tree trunk. A shotl An explosive bullet and a lung 

was blown apart. Solovyov was killed-and the Tonshayevo 

wolf got a hundred-ruble prize. ("Tonshayevo wolves" ... were 

the local inhabitants of Tonshayevo District near Burepolom, 

who had all enlisted in the VOKhR during the war, so as-to be 

closer to home and not go to the front. This was the same Tonshayevo 

District where the· children used to shout: "Mama! 

Here comes a herring!") 

This absoluteness in the relations between the convoy and 

the prisoners, this continual right of the guards to use a bullet 

instead of a word, could not fail to influence the character of the 

VOKhR officers and the VOKhR enlisted men as well. The lives 

of the prisoners were given into their power, though not for 

the whole day, yet totally and profoundly. To them the natives


SS9 

were not people. They were some sort of lazy animated scarecrows, 

whom fate had given them to count, to drive to work and 

from work as swiftly as possibler and to keep at work as densely 

crowded together as possible. 

But tyranny was even more intense among the officers of the 

VOKhR. These young whippersnappers of lieutenants had acquired 

a balefully despotic sensation of power over existence. 

Some were only loud-mouthed (Senior Lieutenant Chorny in 

Nyroblag), others reveled in CI1lClty and even let it carry over 

to their own soldiers (Lieutenant Samutin, in the same camp); 

still others did not recognize any limitations on their omnipotence. 

The Commander of VOKhR; Nevsky (Camp No.3 at 

Ust-Vym>, discovered the loss of his dog-not a service.~dog, but 

his beloved little lap dog. He went to look for it. of course, in the 

camp compound, and it was his luck to catch five natives divi~g 

up the carcass. He pulled out his pistol and shot one dead on 

the spot. (There were no administrative consequences of the 

incident, except punishment of the remaining four zeks in the 

penalty isolator.) . 

In 1938 in the area west of the Urals a forest fire flew with 

the. speed of a hurricane along the Vishera River~d from. 

the forest into two camps. What was to be done wi~ the zeks? 

The decision had to be made instantly-there was no time to 

consult with higher jurisdictjons. The guard refused to release 

yehtd~meht all burned to death. That was .the easy way. If 

they had been releaSed and escaped~ the guards would have beed 

court-martialed. 

There was only one limitation in VOKhR service on the 

·bubbling energy of its officers: The platoon was the basic unit, 

and all that omnipotence came to an end above the platoon, and 

in rank above lieutenant. Advancement in the battalion simply 

had the effect of separating the officer from the actual and real 

power of the platoon,and was a dead-end street. 

, And as a result. the most power-hungry and powerful of the 

VOIPtR officers tried to leapfrog into the internal service of the 

MVD and to get their promotion there. Certain famous Gulag 

biographies consisted indeed of this. The already mentioned 

Antonov, the ruler of the "road of the dead" in the Arctic, had 

risen from a VOKhR comJllander, and his whole education was 

... through the fourth grade. 

There is no doubt that inside the Ministry the selection of the 


infantry guard of the MVD was considered of great importance. 

and the military conscription centers had secret instructions on 

this. The military conscription centers conduct a great deal of 

secret work. Yet we take a b~nign attitude toward them. Why, for 

example, has there been such a determined rejection of the 

twenties concept of territorial armies (the project of.Prunze)? 

And why is it. exactly to the contrary, that the newly called recruits 

are sent with exceptional persistence to serve in armies that 

are as far as possible from their own region-Azerbaijanians to 

Estonia, Latvians to the Caucasus, etc.? Because the armies must 

be alien to the local population, and preferably even of a different 

race (as was tested in Novocherkassk in 1962). And SQ in the 

selection of convoy troops there was, not without design, a higher 

percentage of Tatars and other Ininority nationalities; their inferior 

education and thllir lack of information were valuable to 

the state, they were its fortress. 

But the real scientific organization and training of these 

armies only began at the same time as the Special Camps-the 

Osoblagi-at the end of the forties and the beginning of the 

fifties. Th~y began to ,take only nineten-year~old boys and immediately 

would subject them to intense ideological irradiation. 

(We are going to discuss this convoy separately.) 

But until then it somehow seemed to be beyond their reach 

in Gulag. The truth was that not all our pedple, even though 

socialist, .had yet risen to that steadfast cruel level necessary for 

a worthy camp guard! The VOKhR staff was uneven, and ceased 

to be the wall of horror it was intended to be. It softened up 

especially in the years of the Soviet-German war; the very best 

trained (in "good viciousness") of the young fellows had to be 

surrendered to the front, and sickly reservists were dragged into 

VOKhR, too unhealthy to be suitable for the active army. and 

too untrained in viciousness for Gulag (they were not ·brought 

up in the right years). In the most mercilessly hungry war years 

in camp this relaxation of the VOKhR (wherever it took place; 

it didn't take place everywhere) at least partially eased the life 

of the prisoners. 

Nina Samshel recollects her father, who. in 1942, was called 

up iDto the army at an advanced age and sent to serve· as a 

guaicf m a camp in Archangel Province. His faInily joined him 

there. "At home my father spoke bitterly about life in camp, and


about the good people who were there. When my papa·had to 

guard a brigade all' by himself at a prison farm [this, too, was 

wartime-one guard for the whole brigade: wasn't that a relaxation?], 

I often went to see him there and he allowed me to talk 

with the prisoners. The prisoners had a lot of respect for my 

father; he was never rude .to them, and he let them go to the 

store, for example, when they asked, and they never tried to 

escape from him. They said to. me: 'Now if only all the convoy 

. guards were like your father!' He knew that many innocents had 

been imprisoned, 8 and he was always indignant, but only at 

home-in the' platoon he could say nothing. 'l'h~y Imprisoned 

people 'for that." At the end of the war he was immediately 

demobilized . 

• B1,1t one CanDot consider Samshel a typical wartime model. 

His subseql,lent fate shows it. In 1947 he himself was arrested 

under Article 58! And in 1950 he was released becauSe he was 

dying and allowed to return home, where he died five months 

later. . 

After the war this, loose sort of guardtng still lasted a year or 

two, and it somehow began to.happen that many, of the VOJ{hR 

guards also began to talk of their service as their "sentence": 

''Wlten I finish my sentence." They understood the shame of 

their service, the kind of service you could not talk about to the 

family at home. In that same Ortau, one cQnvoy guard inte~tionally 

stole something from the KVCh, and was' dismissed from the 

service and convicted and immediately amnestied-and' the 

other guards envied him: He had found the way! Smart boy! 

N. Stolyarova recalls a guard who caught her at the beginning 

of an escape attempt..:-and concealed her attempt. And she was 

not punished. One other shot, himself out· of love for a zechka 

sent off on a prisoner transport. Before the introduction of real 

severities in the, women's camps, friendly, good, yes, and even' 

loving relations between the women prisoners and the convoy 

guards had often begun. Not even our great state had managed 

to stamp out goodness and love everywhere! 

The young reinforcements of the postwar years also did not 

become immediately what Gulag wanted them to be. When a 

rebme~ of the Nyroblag infantry guards; Vladilen Zadomy, 


mutinied (we will have more to say about him), his mates in 

the service who were of his age took a very sympathetic attitude 

toward his resistance. . 

Self-guarding constitutes a special area in the history of the 

camp guard. Back, indeed, in the first postrevolutionary years it 

was proclaimed that self-watch was a duty of Soviet prisoners. 

This was employed at Solovki, not without success, and very 

widely on the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and on the Moscow-Volga' 

Canal; every socially friendly prisoner who did not wish to push 

a wheelbarrow could take up a rifle against ·his comrades. 

We will not affirm that this was a special, diabolical plan for 

the moral disintegration of the people. As always in the halfcentury 

of our most recent modem history, a lofty, bright theory 

and creeping moral vileness somehow got naturally interwoven, 

and were easily transformed into one another. But from the 

stories of the old zeks it has become known that. the prisoner 

trusty guards were cruel to their own brothers; strove to curry 

favor and to hold on to their dogs' duties, and sometimes settled 

old accounts with a bullet on the spot. 

And this has also been noted in our literature on jurisprudence: 

"In many cases those who were deprived of freedom 

carried out their duties of guarding the colonies and maintaining 

order better than the staff jailers. tolO . 

And so tell me-what bad is there that one cannot teach a 

nation? Or people? Or all humanity? 

That particular quotation came from the thirties, and Zadomy. 

confirms it as being also true for the end of the forties: the trusty 

guards were vicious toward their comrades, used formal reasons 

for entrapment, and shot them. And in Parma, the penalty 

expedition of Nyroblag, the only prisoners were the 58's and the 

trusty guards were also 58's. Politicals ... 

Vladilen tells about the trusty guard Kuzma, a former chauffeur, 

a young fellow little more than twenty years old. In 1949 

he had received a tenner for 58-10'. How was he to survive? He 

could find no other way. In 1952 Vladilen found him working 

as a trusty guard. His situation tormented him, and he said he 

could not bear the burden of his rifle. When he went out on guard 

duties; he often didn't load it. At night he wept, caIling himself 

9. The guard Samshel knew, but our elite writen did notlmow! 

10. Vyshinsky, op. cit., p. 141.


a mercenary coward, and he even wanted to shoot himself. Hehad 

a high forehead, a nervous face. He loved verses, and he 

went off with Vladilen into the taiga to recite them. And then 

again he used to take up his rifie .... 

And he knew a trusty guard named Aleksandr Lunin, who 

was already well along in years and whose gray locks formed-a 

wreath about his forehead, and _ who had a kind, good-natured 

smile. In the war he had been an infantry lieutenant-~d then . 

the chairman of a collective farm. He had received a tenner 

(under a nonpolitical article) because he had refused to' give 

in to the demands of the District Party Committee and had 

arranged distributions to the collective farmers on his own. 

Which means he was that kind of man! His neighbors were 

dearer to him than. he himself was. And there in Nyroblag he 

became a trusty guard, and even earned a reduction in his term 

from the .chief of th.e Promezhutochnaya Camp. 

The bounds of a human being! No matter how you are 

astounded by them, you can never comprehend: . -.. 

Chapter 21 

• 

Campside 

Like a piece of rotten meat which not only stinks right on its 

own surface but also surrounds itself with a stinking molecular 

cloud of stink, so, too, each island of the Archipelago created 

and supported a zone of stink around itself. This zone, more 

extensive than .the Archipelago' itself, was the intermediate 

traJlsJnUsion zone between the small zone of each individual 

island and tlle Big Zone-the Big Camp Compound--comprising 

the entire .country. 

Everything of the most infectious nature in the Archipelago 

--:-in human relations, morals, views, and language-in compliance 

with the universal law of osmosis in plant and imimal 

tissue, seeped first into this transmission zone and then dispersed 

through the entire country. It was right here,.in the transmission 

zone, that those elements of camp ideology and culture worthy 

of entering into the nationwide culture underwent trial and 

Selection. And when camp expressions ring in the corridors of 

the new building of the Moscow State University, or when an 

independent woman in the capital delivers a verdict wholly from 

out of camp on the essence of Iife-don't be surprised: it got 

there via the transmission zone, via campside. 

While the government attempted (or perhaps did not attempt) 

to re-educate the prisoners through slogans, the Cultural and 

Educational Section, censorship of mail, and the security chiefs 

-the prisoners more swiftly re-educated the entire country 

through campside~' The thieves' philosophy, which initially had 

conquered the Archipelago, easily swept further and captured 

the All-Union ideological market, a wasteland without any 

564

Campside .1 565 

stronger ideology. The camp tenacity, its cruelty in human relations, 

its armor of insensitivity over the heart, its hostility to 

any kind of conscientious work-all this effortlessly tamec! 

campside without difficulty, and then went on to make a deep 

impression on all freedom. 

Thus it is that the Archipelago. takes its vengeance on the 

Soviet Union fQr its creation. 

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without iD,lpaci. 

Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is 

cheap . 

• 

To give a list of these places, these hick towns, these settlements. 

would be almost the same as recapitulating the geography of the 

entire Archipelago. There wasn't a single camp compound which 

could ever exist on its own-next door to it there had to be a 

settlement of free people. Sometimes this settlement at some 

temporary logging camp or other would stand there several 

years-and disappear along with the camp. Sometimes it would 

put down fOOts, get a name, a town soviet, a branch line-and 

stay there forever. And sometimes famous cities would grow up 

out of these settlements-like Magadan, Dudinka, Igarka, 

Temir-Tau, Balkhash, Dzhezkazgan, Angren, Taishet, Bratsk, 

Sovetskaya Gavan. These settlements festered not only in the 

outposts of the wilderness, but also in the very torso of Russiaaround 

the mines of the Donbas and Tula, next to peat diggings, 

next to agricultural camps. Som~times entire districts were infected 

and belonged to the world of campside, like Tonshayevo. 

And when a camp was injected into the body of a big city, even 

Moscow itself, campside also existed-not in the form of a 

special settlement, but in the form of those separate individuals 

who flowed away from it every night on trolleybuses and motorbuses 

and who were drawn back into it again every morning. 

(In these cases the transmission of. the infection proceeded outside 

at an accelerated rate.) 

There were also such towns as Kizel (on the Perm mining 

. and metallurgical branch line); they had begun their existence 

before there was any Archipelago, but subsequently turned out 

to be surrounded - by a multitude of camps-and thus were 

transformed into provincial capitals of the Archipelago. Such a 


city would be permeated by the camp atmosphere. The camp 

officers and groups of the camp guards would go afoot or ride 

through it. in droves, like occupying forces; the camp administration 

would be the city's main institution; the telephone network 

would not belong to the city but to the camps; the bus routes 

would all lead from the city's center to the camps; and all the 

town inhabitants would earn their living off the camps. 

The largest of such provincial capitals of the Archipelago was 

Karaganda. It was created by and filled with exiles and former 

prisoners to such a degree that a vetefan zek could not walk the 

street without running into old acquaintances. The city had 

several camp administrations. And individual camps were 

scattered all around it like the sands of the sea. 

Who lived in campside? (1) The basic indigenous local inhabitants 

(there might ~e none). (2) The VOKhR-the Militarized 

Camp Guards. (3) The camp officers and their families. 

( 4) The jailers and their families-and jailers, as distinct from 

camp guards, always lived with their families, even when they 

were listed as on military service. (5) Former zeks (released 

from the local camp or one nearby).l (6) Various restricted 

persons-"half-repressed" people, people with "unclean" passports. 

(Like the former zeks, they, too, were here not of their 

own free will, but of necessity; even if the particular place had 

not been assigned them as though they were exiles, it would be 

worse for them anywhere else in regard to both work and housing, 

and they might not even have been allowed to live anywhere else 

anyway.) (7) The works administration. These were highly placed 

people and constituted in all only a few people in a big settlement. 

(And sometimes there were none at all.) (8) Then, too, 

there were the free employees-the volnyashki-proper, all the 

. tramps and riffraff-all kinds of strays and good-for-nothings 

and seekers after easy money. After all, in these remote death 

traps you could work three times as poorly as in the metropolis 

and get four times the wages-with bonuses for the Arctic, for 

remoteness, and for hardship, and you could also steal the work 

of the prisoners. And, in addition, many flocked there under 

recruitment programs and on contract, receiving moving and 

1. The Stalinist epoch has gone, and various warm and cold breezes have 

blown over us-but many former zeks never did leave campside, never left 

their backwoods localities-and they were right not to. There they are at least 

half people, whereas here they would not be even that. They will stay there till 

they die, and their children will assimilate like the local inhabitants.

Campside I 567 

traveling expenses as well. For those able to pan the gold out of 

the work sheets campside was a real Klondike. People swarmed 

there· with forged diplomaS; adventilrers, rascals, and moneygrabbers 

poured in. It was particularly advantageous here for 

those who needed the free use of someone else's brains. (A 

semiliterate geologist would have zek geologists to carry out his 

field observations, work them up, draw all the conclusions, and 

then he himself could go defend his dissertation in the metropolis.) 

They sent here the total failures, and those who were 

simply hopeless drunks. Men came here after their families had 

broken up or to avoid alimony. Then, too, there were the young 

graduates of technical schools who had failed to get themselves 

into cushy spots when obligatory jobs were being assigned. But 

from the very first day of their arrival here they began to try to 

get back to the civilized world, and whoever couldn't manage it 

in one year's time would certainly be able to .do it in two. But 

there was also quite a different category among the free em~ 

. ployees: the elderly, who had already lived in campside for whole 

decades and had become so assimilated to its atmosphere that 

they no longer needed some .other, sweeter world. If their camp 

shut down, or if the aCilministration stopped paying them what 

they demanded-they left. But invariably they would move to 

some other such zone near a camp. They knew no other way· to 

live. This was the situation of Vasily Aksentyevich Frolov, a 

great drunkard, a cheat, and a "famous master of casting," about 

whom I could tell many tales, except that I have already described 

him. Without any diploma, and despite the fact that he had drunk 

down his last skill as a master, he never -received less than five 

thousand pre-Khrushchev rubles a month. 

In the most general sense the word "volnyashka" means just 

any free person, in other words any citizen of the Soviet Union 

not· yet arrested or already released, and therefore every citizen 

of campside. But most often this word was used in the Archipelago 

in the narrow sense: a ''volIJ.yashka'' is that particular 

kind of free person who worked alongside prisoners in. the same 

work compound. By this token those in groups 1,5, and 6 above 

who came to the camp. work compound to work were also 

"volnyashki.!' 

"Volnyashki" were hired as construction superintendents, 

foremen, lIead foremen, warehouse managers, ~d norm setters. 

In addition; they were hired for those posts in which the employ- 


mentof zeks would have ~ade the work of the convoy much 

more difficult: drivers, draymen, dispatchers, tractor dri¥ers, 

excavator operators, scraper operators, electrical linemen, night 

firemen. 

These second-class ''volnyashki,'' ordinary sloggers like the 

zeks, made friends with us right away without nonsense, and did 

everything forbidden by the camp regimen and by criminal law: 

they willingly· deposited thezeks' letters in the free mailboxes 

of the settlement; they took and sold at the local free markets 

clothes the zeks had pinched in camp and kept the money, bringing 

the zeks ·some grub; together with the zeks they also plundered 

the project: they brought vodka into the work compound. 

(Despite very strict inspection at the gatehouse, they would drop 

flasks of vodka with tarred necks into die gasoline tanks of 

automobiles. )2 

And wherever it was possible to credit the zeks' work to free 

people (the foremen and the head foremen were not at all 

squeamish about crediting themselves too), this was invariably 

done; after all, work credited to a prisoner did nothing for anyone. 

No one paid any money for it, but only gave them a bread 

. ration. And that was why iii unrationed times it made good 

sense to cemplete the zek's work sheet any old way, just so there 

was no· serious trouble, and to credit the zek's work to a free 

man. The ''volnyashka'' got money for it,and he ate and drank 

hitnself, and gave his own zeks something to eat as welI.8 

2. And if it happened that the guard found them, there would still be no 

official report fiJed with the- chief; the Komsomol guards preferred to drink any 

contraband vodka themselves. 

3. The great advantage of working in campslde could easily be observed 

even among the free employees of the Moscow camps. At our camp at the 

Kaluga Gates in 1946 there were twofree bricklayers, one plasterer, one painter. 

They were listed as being employed at our construction project. As far as work. 

went, they did almost none, because the project could not pay them large wages; 

there were no special bonus wages bere,. and all the areas were measured off 

exactly. For plastering one square yard they got thirty-two kopecks, and it was 

simply impossible to C;harge one and a half rubles per yard or to inflate the 

square yarils to three times more than the room measured. But, in the first 

place, our free employees hauled off cement, paint, linseed oil, and glass, and. 

in the second place, they got a good rest during their eight-hour workday, and 

so at night and on. Sundays they could really put their hearts into their main 

work-their work "on the left," private work-and there they made their 

money up. For the same square yard of wall space, that same plasterer got 

not thirty-two kopecks but ten rubles from a private person, and in the course 

of one evening he would earn two hundred .-ubles! 

After all, as Prokhorov said: "Money nowadays comes in two stories." 

What Westerner could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator dur-


And so in general you could not call the relations between the 

zeks and the ''volnyashki'' hostile. Instead, they were frieQ,dly. 

And these lost,' half-drunken, ruined people were more sensitive 

to the grief of others, were capable of paying heed to the grief 

of a prisoner and the injustice of his arrest. The eyes of an unprejudiced 

human being were open to what the eyes of the 

officers, jailers; and guards were closed to because of their 

position. 

The relations· between the zeks and the foremen and the head 

foremen were more complex. As "commanders of production" 

they were put there to squeeze the prisoners and drive them. But 

they were answerable for the course of the work, and the work 

couldn't always be carried out in a condition of direct hostility 

between them and the zeks. Not everything can be got by hunger 

and the stick. Some things require willing agreement, both by 

inclination and by imagination: And the .only foremen who were 

successful' were those who reached an understanding with the 

brigadiers and with the best of the skilled craftsmen among the 

prisoners. And the foremen themselves were not just drunks and 

not simply enfeebled and poisoned by the constant employment 

of slave labor; they were itlso illiterate, and either knew nothing 

,of their line of work or else knew it 'Very badly, and because of 

this were even more dependent on the brigadiers. 

And how interestingly Russian fates sometimes intertwined 

there! A carpenters' foreman, Fyodor Ivanovich Muravlyov, 

came to us in his cups before a holiday and bared his soul to the 

brigadier of painters, Sinebryukhov, an outstanding master of 

his trade, a serious, steadfast fellow who was serving out his 

tenth year: 

"What? You're serving time, you kulak's son? Your father 

kept plowing away at the land and accumulated coWs and figured 

ing the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and 

bread cost 140 rubles on the open markei. And that meant that in the course of 

one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above 

his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day 

for the whole family! Bot at the same time he did ' .•• live. With frank and 

open impUdence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and 

seek "the second star)'." And tile person who paid our plasterer insane money 

for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particolar 

way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on' paper. 

The old ways-tenacious, ftexible-never died oot, as a result of either curses 

or persecotion by the prosecotors. 

570 I THE GULAG. ARCHIPELAGO 

he would take it all o{f to the kingdom of heaven. And where is 

he now? He died in exile? And they imp~ned you too? No, 

my father was smarter than that; from his earliest years he drank 

down everything and our hut wItS empty, and he didn't even give 

his chickens to the collective farm because he didn't have any or 

anything else-and right off they made him a brigadier. And I 

take after him-drinking vodka, and I know no grief." 

And as it turned out he was right: Sinebryukhov, after serving 

out his sentence, would be sent off to exile, and Muravlyov . . . 

would become the chairman of the trade union committee on 

construction. 

True, the construction superintendent, Buslov, could not wait 

. to get rid of this chairman of the local trade union committee and 

foreman. (It was impossible to get rid of him; it was the personnel 

department that hired, not the construction superintendent, 

and the personnel department would often select loafers 

and dolts out of a feeling of kinship.) The construction superintendent 

answered for all the materials and wage fund out of 

his own pocket, but Muravlyov, out of illiteracy, or else because 

he was a simpleton (and he was not at all a malicious character, 

and because of this the brigadiers used to carry him), would 

squander that wage fund, sign unexamined work vouchers 

(which the brigadiers would fill in themselves), and accept badly 

done work, which would then have to be broken up and done 

over again. And Buslov would have been glad to replace that kind 

of foreman with a zek engineer who was working there with a 

pick, but because of vigilance the personnel department did not 

permit this. 

"Well, now, tell mC?: what length 'beams do you have at the 

moment on the site?" 

Muravlyov sighed deeply. "For the time being I hesitate to tell 

you exactly." 

And the drunker Muravlyov got, the more impudently he used 

to speak to the construction superintendent. And at that point 

the construction superintendent decided to besiege him with 

paper work. Despite the time'it cost, he began to put all his 

orders in writing (keeping carbons in a file). These orders were 

not ex~uted, of course, and a fearsome case was being built up. 

But the chairman of the local union was not at a loss. He got 

himself a half-sheet of wrinkled notebook paper, and took half 

an hour to scrawl out with difficulty, clumsily:


i bring toyr information That an mechanisms which are for 

carpeny work in not working order whichis in a Bad state and 

," exclusively do not work. 

The construction superintendent was quite a different level 

of work management. For the prisoners he was a constant oppressor 

and a constant enemy. The construction superintendent 

would not enter either into friendly relations with the brigadiers 

or into deals with them. He used to cut back their worksheets, 

expose their "tukhta" (to the extent that he was smart enough), 

and he could always punish a brigadier and any prisoner through 

the camp administration: 

To Camp Chief Lieutenant: 

I request you to punish in the severest manner-preferably in 

punishment cel~but with his being taken out to work-the brigadier 

of the cement workers, the prisoner Zozulya, and the foreman, 

the prisoner Orachevsky, for casting slabs thicker than the indicated 

measurement, in which was expressed an overexpenditure of cement. 

Simultaneously I wish to inform you that this day in dealing with 

me on the question of registering the volume of work in the work 

sheets the prisoner brigadier Alekseyev insulted the foreman Comrade 

Tumarkin, calling him a jackass. Such conduct on the part of the 

prisoner Alekseyev, which undermines the authority of the free administration, 

I consider extremely undesirable and' even dangerous 

and beg you to take the firmest measures up to and including his 

being sent away on a prisoner transport. 

,Senior ConstrUction Supervisor Buslov. 

This very same Tumarkin had in a suitable moment been called 

a jackass by Buslov himself, but the zek brigadier, on the basis 

of his worth, deserved a prisoner transport. 

Buslov sent the camp chiefs such notes nearly every day. He 

saw the camp punishments as the highest form of work stimulus. 

Buslov was one of those work bosses who had worked himself 

into the Gulag system and who had adapted himself to the ways 

of getting things done. That's what he said at meetings: "1 have 

long experience of work with the zeks, and 1 do not fear their 

threats to flatten me with a brick." But, he regretted, the 

Gulag generations had changed for the worse. The people who 

came to camp after the war, and after Europe, turned out to be 

disrespectful types. "But working in J937, you understand, that 

was pure pleasure. For example, when a free employee entered, 

the zeks invariably rose to their feet." Buslov knew both how to 

S72 


deceive the prisoners and how to put them in dangerous situations, 

and he never spared their strength, nor their stomachs, nor, 

still less, their vanity. Long-nosed, long-legged, wearing yellow 

American oxfords donated to needy Soviet citizens, which he had 

received through UNRRA, he perpetually rushed around the 

floors of the construction, knowing that otherwise the laiy, dirty 

beings called ze-ka ze-ka would be sitting i~ all his comers and 

crannies, lying, wamIing themselves, looking for lice, or even 

copulating, notwithstanding the urgency of the short ten-hour 

working day, and the brigadiers would be crowding the norms 

office and writing up "tukhta" (false figures) on work sheets. 

And out of all the foremen there was only one on whom he 

partially relied-Fyodor Vasilyevich Gorshkov. He was a puny 

old guy with bristling gray mustaches. He had a keen unders~anding 

of the construction, and he knew both his own work and 

that contiguous to his, and his principal and unusual trait among 

the ''volnyashki'' was ~e fact that he had an honest interest in the 

outcome of the construction-not a pocket interest, like Buslov 

(would they fine him or give him a bonus? curse him out or 

praise him?), but an inner interest, just as if he were building 

the whole enormous building for himself and wanted it to be as 

good as possible. He was a careful drinker too, and never lost 

sight of the construction. But he had one major shortcoming: he 

had not adjusted to the Archipelago, and he was unaccustomed 

to keeping the prisoners in terror. He also liked to go around 

the construction and peer searchingly with his own eyes; however, 

he did not rush about like Buslov, and he was not trying 

to catch those who were cheating, and he liked to sit down and 

chat with the carpenters on the beams, with the bricklayers at 

their brickhiying, with the plasterers at their mixing box. Sometimes 

he shared candies with the zeks-a wondrous thing to us. 

There was one kind of work which even in his old age he simply 

could not get along without-glass cutting. -He always had his 

own diamond glass cutter in his pocket, and if someone started 

cutting glass in his presence, he would begin to hoot right off that 

they were cutting it wrong, and he would push the glass workers 

away and cut it himself. Buslov went off for a mOl)th to Sochiand 

Fyodor Vasilyevich replaced him, but he refused flatly to sit 

in Buslov's office, and remained right in the foremen's common 

room.


The whole winter Gorshkov went about in an old Russian short 

"poddyovka"-a waisted·coat. Its collar had grown threadbare, 

but th~ outside material was remarkably well preserved. They 

used to say of that "poddyovka" that Gorshkov had been wearing 

it for going on thirty-one years without ever taking it off, and that 

before that his father had worn it for some years on holidaysand 

thus it developed .that his father, Vasily Gorshkov, had been 

a government foreman. And then it was understandable why 

Fyodor Vasilich liked brick and wood and glass and paint so . 

much-from childhood he had grown up on construction works. 

But even though the foremen were then called government fore.. 

men, . and even though they are not called government foremen 

now, the time they ac~ua1y· became "government foremen" is 

now, whereas before they were ... artists. 

And Fyodor Vasilich would even now praise the old ways: 

"What's a construction superintendent nowadays? He isn't 

able to shift even one kopeck from one place to another. In the 

old days the contractor would come to the workers on Saturday. 

'Well, boys, will it be before the bath or after?' And they would 

answer, 'Afterward, uncle, afterward!'· 'Well, here's your bath 

money, and from there to the tavern.' The boys would pour ·out 

of the baths in a crowd, and the contractor would be waiting for 

them with vO!ika, snacks, and a samovar~ ... Just try after all 

that to work badly on Monday!" 

For us today everything has a name, and we know everything 

about everything; this was the speedup system, merciless exploitation, 

playing on the lowest human instincts. And the drinks and 

the spread that went with them weren't worth what was squeezed 

out of the worker the following week. 

And a bread ration, a wet bread ration,hurled by indifferent 

hands from the window of the bread-cutting room, now . . . was 

that really worth any more? ... 

• 

So all eight of these classifications of free inhabitants elbowed 

one another on the crowded square inch of campside: between 

camp and Jorest, between forest and swamp, between camp and 

mine. Eight different categeries,various ranks and clllSses-and 

all had to fit into that stench-ridden crowded settlement. They 

574 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELA"GO 

were all "comrades" to each other, and they sent their children 

to the same school. 

The kind of comrades they were was such that, like saints in 

the clouds, up above everyone else two or three local magnates 

floated. (In Ekibastuz their names were Khishchuk and 

Karashchuk, * the director and the ·chief engineer of the trustand 

I did not think up those names!) And then in descending 

order, with sharp lines of division carefully observed: the chief 

of camp, the commander of the convoy battalion, other ranking 

officials· of the trust, and officers of the camp, officers of the 

battalion, and, in places, the director of the Workers' Supply 

Section, and, in places, the director of the school (but not the 

teachers). And the higher they went, the more jealously the 

walls separating them were guarded, and the greater the significance 

attached to which woman could go to visit whom, so 

that they could sit and chew sunflower seeds together. (They 

were not princesses, nor even countesses, and so they looked 

around all the more vigilantly to make sure their position had 

not been degraded!) Oh, what a doomed state it was to live in 

this narrow world far away from other well-provided-for families 

living in comfortable, spacious cities. Here everyone knew you, 

and you couldn't just get up and go to the movies without lowering 

yourself, and, of course, you could not go to a store. (The more 

so since they brought the best and the freshest things to your 

home.) It even seemed improper to keep your own piglet; it 

was demeaning for the wife of so-and-so to ·feed it with her own 

hands! (That is why it was necessary to have a servant from the 

camp.) And in the several wards of the settlement hospital how 

difficult it was to .keep apart from the tatterdemalions and trash 

and to lie among decent neighbors. And you had to send your 

nice children to sit behind the same desk$ with whom? 

But further down, these dividing walls quickly lost their precision 

and their significance, and there were no longer any tro,! 

blemaking pleddlers to keep watch over them. Further down, 

the categories inevitably co~mingled, encountered each other, 

bought and sold together, ran to get in lines, and argued about 

the .New Year's tree gifts from the trade unions, sat all mixed 

up together any which way at the movies-both genuine Soviet 

people and those totally unworthy of this title. 

One spiritual center of such settlements was· the main "Tea 

Room" in some rotting barracks near which the trucks lined up

· Campside I S7S 

and from which the drunkards, howling out songs, belching and 

stumbling, wandered around through the whole settlement. And 

among the very same mud puddles and mass of squshy mud 

was the second spiritual center-the Club, its floor covered with 

hulls of spat-out sunflower seeds, scuffed by boots, with a flyblown 

wall newspaper fiom the. previous year, with the constantly 

grumbling loudspeaker over the door, with ~e good old mother 

curses at the dances, and the knife fights after the film show. The 

style and tone of the local places was "Don't be out late," and if 

you took a girl to a dance, the safest thing to do was to put a 

hbrseshoe in your ·mitten. (Yes, and some of the girls there were 

such that even a gang of seven youths would flee from them.) 

This club was a knife in the officers' hearts. Naturally, it was 

quite impossible for officers to go to dances in a shed like that 

among people of that kind. The enlisted men of the guard went 

there when they were on leave passes. But the trouble was that 

the young, childless officers' wives were drawn there too, even 

Without their husbands. And they would end up daficing·with the 

enlisted men! Rank-and-file soldiers embraced the officers' wives! 

So how could you expect faultless obedience from them on dUty 

the next day! After all, this was equality, apd no army can stand 

up under those conditions! Unable to prevent their wives from 

going to the dances, the officers managed to get the dances 

declared out of bounds to enlisted men. (Let some dirty "volnyashki" 

embrace their wives!) But what this did was to..introduce 

a crack in the symmetry of the political indoctrination of 

tb,e enlisted men: that we are all happy and equal citizens of the 

Soviet State, and that our enemies are, you see, behind barbed 

wire. 

Many such complex tensions were hidden in campside, and 

many contradictions among its eight categories. Mingling in 

everyday life with the repressed and semirepressed, honest Soviet 

citizens would not neglect to reproach them and put them in their 

place, especially when it was a matter of a room in a new barracks. 

And the jailers, as wearers of the MVD uniform, claimed 

to be on a higher plane than the ordinary free people. And then 

there were invariably women in everyone's bad books, because 

all the single guys would have been lost without them. And there 

were also women who had plans for getting a.permanent man. 

That kind would go to the camp gatehouse when they knew there 

would be a release-and they would grab complete strangers by 


the sleeve: "Come to' my place! I have a place, and I will keep 

you warm. I will buy you a suit! Well, where are you going? 

After all, they'll just jug you again." 

And there was also a security surveillance over the whole 

settlement. The settlement had its own "godfather." And its own 

stoolies, and they would flex their muscles: just who was taking 

letters from the zeks to be mailed outside, and who was selling 

camp clothing behind the comer of the barracks. 

And then, too, of course, there was less sense of the presence 

of the Law among the inhabitants of campside than anywhere 

else in the Soviet Union, or that their barracks. room was a castle. 

Some had "unclean" passports, and others had no passports at 

all, and others had been imprisoned in camp themselves, and 

others were members of families. And thus all these independent 

unconvoyed citizens were even more obedient than the prisoners 

to the command of a man with a rifle, even more meek in the 

face of the man with a revolver. When they saw one, they did 

not throw back their proud heads and declare: "You don't have 

the right!" They would shrink and bow their heads-and slink 

past. 

And this sense of the unlimited power of the bayonet and the 

uniform hovered so confidently over the expanses of the Archipelago 

and campside, so communicated itself to everyone who 

entered the region, that the free woman (P--china) who flew 

to Krasnoyarsk with her little girl to visit her husband in camp 

allowed herself to be searched and patted all over at the first 

demand of the MVD officials in the plane, and allowed her child 

to be completely undressed. (Since then the little girl has wept 

every time she has seen the Skyblues.) 

But if someone now says that there is nothing sadder than these 

camp environs and that campside is a sewer, we will reply: That 

depends on the individual. 

A Yakut named Kolodeznikov got three years in 1932 for 

rustling reindeer, and, under our perspicacious relocation policy, 

was sent from his native Kolyma to serve his time near Leningrad. 

He served out his time and was in Leningrad itself, and he 

brought his family some bright-colored dress materials, yet for 

many years after complained to his fellow tribesmen and to the 

zeks who had been sent from Leningrad: "Oh, it's boring where 

you come from! It's awful!"

578 I THB GULAG ARCHIPB LAGO 

Chapter 22 

• 

We Are Building 

After everything that has been said about the camps, the question 

simply bursts out: That's enough! But was the prisoners' 

labor profitable to the state? And if it was not profitable-then 

was it worthwhile undertaking the whole Archipelago? 

In the camps themselves both points of view on this were to 

be found among the zeks, and we used ~o love to argue about it. 

Of course, if one believed the leaders, there was nothing to 

argue about. On the subject of the use of the prisoners' labor, 

Comrade Molotov, once the second-ranking man in the state, 

declared at the Sixth Congress of the Soviets of the U.S.S.R.: 

"We did this earlier. We are doing it now. And we are going to 

go on doing it in the future. It is profitable to society. It is useful 

to·the criminals." 

Not profitable to the state, note that! But to society itself. And 

useful to the criminals. And we will go on doing it in the future! 

So what is there to. argue about? 

Yes, the entire system of the Stalin decades, when first the 

construction projects were planned, and only afterward the recruitment 

of criminals to man them took place, confirms that the 

government evidently had no doubt of the economic profitability 

of the camps. EconolIlics went before justice. . 

But it is quite evident that the question posed needs to be 

made more precise and to be split into parts: 

• Did the camps justify themselves in a political and social 

. sense? . 

• Did they justify themselves economically? 

577 

• Did they pay for themselves (despite the apparent similarity 

of the second and third questions, there is a difference)? 

It is not difficult to answer the fitst question: For Stalin's purposes 

the camps were a wonderful place into which he could herd 

millions as a form of il!timidation. And so it appears that they 

justified themselves politically. The camps were also profitable in 

lucre to an enormous social stratum-the countless number of 

camp officers; they gave them "military service" safely in the rear, 

special rations, pay, uniforms, apartments, and a position in 

society. Likewise they sheltered throngs 'Of jailers and hard-head 

guards who dozed atop camp towers (while thirten-year~old 

boys were driven into trade schools). And all these parasites 

upheld the Archipelago with all their strength-as a nest of serf 

exploitation. They feared a 'universal amnesty like the plague. 

But we have already understood that by no means only those 

with different ideas, by no means only those who had got off 

the trodden path marked out by Stalin, were in the camps. The 

recruitment into camps obviously and clearly exceeded political 

needs, exceeded the needs of terror. It was proportionate (although 

perhaps in Stalin's head alone) to economic plans. Yes, 

and had not the camps (and exile) arisen out of the crisis unemployment. 

of the twenties? From 1930 on, it was/not that the 

digging of canals was invented for dozing camps, but that camps 

were urgently scraped together for the envisioned canals. It was 

not the number of genuine "criminals" (or even "doubtful persons") 

which determined the intensity of the courts' activities 

-but the requisitions of the economic establishment. At the 

beginning of the Belomor Canal there was an immediate shortage 

of Solovetsky Islands zeks, and it became clear that three years 

was too short and too unprofitable a sentence for the 58's, that 

they had to serve out two Five-Year plans taken together. 

The' reason why the camps proved economically profitable 

had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather 

of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was 

needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, 

under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and 

primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct 

housing, schools, hospitals, ana stores for many years to come. 

For work with pick and spade-in the flowering of the twentieth 

I

We Are Building I 579 

century. For the erection of the great conStruction projects of 

socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist. 

On the,great Belomor Canal even an aUfOmobile was a rarity. 

Everything was created, as they say in camp, with "fart power." 

On the even larger Moscow-Volga Canal (seven times bigger 

in scaIe of work than the Belomor Canal and comparable to the 

Panama Canal and the Suez Canal), 80 miles of canal were 

dug to a depth of over sixteen feet and a top width of 280 feet. 

And almost all of it with pic~ shovel, and wheelbarrow. 1 The 

future bottom of the Rybinsk Sea was covered with forest expanses. 

All of them were cut down by hand, and nary an electric 

saw was seen there, and the branches and brushwood were burned 

by total invalids. 

Who, except prisoners, would have worked at logging ten hours 

a day, in addition to marching four miles through the woods in 

predawn darkness and' the sam~ distance back at night, in a 

temperature of minus 20, and knowing in a year no other rest 

days than May 1 and November 7? (Volgolag, 1937.) 

And who other than the Archipelago natives would have 

deb~rg out stumps in winter? Or hauled on their backs the boxes 

of mined ore in the open goldfields of the Kolyma? Or have 

dragged cut timber a half-mile from the Koin River (a tributary 

of the Vym) through deep snow on Finnish timber-sledge runners, 

harnessed up in pairs in a horse collar (the collar bows upholstered 

with tatters of rotten clothing to make them softer and 

the horse collar worn over one shoulde);)? 

T/.'Ue, the authorized journalist Y. Zhukov2 assures us the 

Komsomols bwlt the city of Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur (in 1932) 

thus: They cut down trees without axes, having no smithies,· got 

no bread, and died from scurvy. And he is delighted: Oh, how 

heroically we built! And would it not be more to the point to be 

indignant? Who was it, hating their own people, who sent them 

to build in such conditions? But what's the use of indignation? 

We, at least, know what kind of "Komsomols" built Komsomolsk. 

And today they writeS that those "Komsomols" founded Magadan 

too!

We Ate Building I 581 

The camps were uniquely profitable in terms of the submissiveness 

of the slave labor and its cheapness--no, it was not just 

cheap, it cost nothing, because in antiquity money did have to 

be paid for a slave, whereas no one paid anything to buy a camp 

inmate. . . 

Even at the postwar camp conferences, the- industrial serf 

owners admitted that "the Z/K Z/K played a big role in the work 

in the rear, in the victory." 

_ 

But no one will ever engrave their forgotten names on a marble 

tombstone placed over their bones. . 

How irreplaceable the camps were was discovered in Khrushchev's 

tUne,· during the bothersome, vociferous Komsomol appeals 

for volunteers for the virgin lands and construction projects 

in Siberia. 

The question of the camps' paying for themselves was, however, 

a different question. The state's saliva had been flowing 

over this for a long time. As long ago as the "Statutes on Places 

of Confinement" in 1921 there had been the plea that "places 

of confinement must, if possible, pay their way with the labor of 

the prisoners." Ftom 1922 on, certain local executive committees, 

going against their worker and peasant character, manifested 

"tendencies of an apolitical pragmatism," and in particular: not 

only did they seek to have the places of confinement pay. their 

own way, but they tried in addition to squeeze profits out of them 

for the local budget, to make them self-supporting plus. Th~ 

Corrective Labor Code of 1924 also demanded that places of 

confinement be self-supporting. In 1928 at the First AII-UniQn 

Conference of Penitentiary Executives there was ~tubom insistence 

that there must be an obligatory "reimbursement to the 

state by the entire netwOrk of entarprises of places of confinement 

of expenditures by the state on these places of confinement." 

They so wanted to have their little camps-and free too! From 

1929 all the corrective-labor institutions of the country were 

included in the economic plan. And on January 1, 1931, it was 

decreed that all camps and colonies in the Russian Soviet Federated 

Socialist Republic and the Ukraine were to become com"' 

pletely self-supporting. 

And what happened next? Instant success, of course! In 1932 

the jurists proclaimed triumphantly: "The expenditures on cor 

: rective-Iabor institutions have been reduced [this can be believ.ed] 

b 

582 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAG.O 

and the conditions in. which those deprived of freedom are maintained 

are improving with etlCh year [1]."6 . 

We would be surprised, and we would try to find out why this 

happened and how? H we ourselves hadn't· experienced on our 

own backs just exactly how -that maintenance imprOved later 

on .... 

But if you come to think about it, it wasn't so very difficult 

at all! What.was required? To make expenditures on camps equal 

the income from them? The expenditures, as we read, were being 

. reduced. To increase income was even simpler: by squeezing the 

prisoners! H, in the Solovetsky Islands period of the Archipelago, 

an official 40 percent discount was applied to forced labor (the 

assumption being. for some reason, that labor performed under 

a club was not so productive), then as early as the Belomor 

Canal, when the "stomach scale" of compensation was introduced, 

the scholars of Gulag discove(ed that, on the contrary. 

forced and hungry labor was the most productive in the world! 

The Ukrainian Camp Administration, when ordered to become . 

. seH-supporting in 1931, decided directly: to increase the productivity 

of labor in the coming year by nei~r more nor less 

than 242 percent (two hundred forty-two percent!) in comparison 

with the preceding y~in other words, by two and a haH 

times, and without any mechanization!8 (And how scientifically 

this worked out! Two hundred forty and another· two percent! 

The only thing the comrades did not know was: What this is 

called is "The Great Leap Forward Beneath Three Red Banners.") 

And you see how Gulag knew 1n which direction the wind was 

blowing! Right then was when the immortally historic Six Conditions 

of Comrade Stalin poured forth-among them sel/-support! 

But we in Gulag already have it! We already have it! And 

once again: the use of specialists! But for us this was the easiest 

of all: to take the engineers off general work! Assign them to 

posts as work trusties! (The beginning of the thirties was the 

most privileged period for ·the technical intelligentsia in the 

Archipelago; almostnone of them were forced to drag out an 

existence at general work, and even newcomers were immediately 

s. Vysbinsky. op. cit., p. 437. 

6. Averbakb, op. cit~ p. 23.

We Are Building I 583. 

established in their field of specialization. Up to that time, in the 

twenties, engineers and technicians perished for nothing on general 

work because they were not" deployed or made use of. After 

this period, from 1937 right up to the fifties, self-support was 

forgotten, and all the historic Six Conditions along with it, and 

the main thing historically then became Vigilance-and the 

infiltration of the eqgineers, one by one 1 into trusty ranks alternated 

with waves of expelling them all to gene(al work.) Anyway 

it was cheaper, too, to have a prisoner engineer rather than a 

free person; no wages had to be paid him! Once again profit, once 

again. self-support! Once again CQmrade Stalin was right! ~ 

SO this line had been drawn out of the distant past, and they 

had carried it on correctly too: the Archipelago had to cost 

nothing! 

But no matter how they huffed and puffed and broke all· their 

nails on the crags, no matter how they corrected the plan fulfillment 

sheets twenty times over, and wore them down to holes iD. 

the paper, the Archipelago did not pay its own way, and it never 

will! The income from it would never equal the expenses, and 

our young workers' arid peasants' state (subsequently the elderly 

st-ateof all the people) is forced to haul this filthy bloody bag 

along on its back. 

And here's why. The first and principal cause was the lack of 

conscieI;ltiousness of the prisoners, the negligence of those stupid 

slaves. Not only couldn't you expect any socialist self-sacrifice 

of them, but they didn't even manifest simple capitalist diligence. 

All they were on the looko\lt for was ways to spoil their footgear 

-and not go out to work; how. to wreck a crane, to buckle a 

wheel, to break a spade, to sink a pail-anything for a pretext to 

sit down and smoke. All that the camp inmates made for their 

own dear state was openly and blatantly botched: you could 

break the bricks they made with your bare hands; the paint would 

peel off the panels; the plaster would fall off; posts would fall 

down; tables rock; legs fall.out; handles come off. Carelessness 

and mistakes were everywhere. And it could happen that you 

had to te~ off a roof already nailed on, redig the ditch they had 

filled in, demolish with crowbar and drill a wall they had already 

built. In the fifties they brought a new Swedish turbine to Steplag~ 

It came in a frame made of logs like a hut. It was winter, and it 

was cold, and so the cursed zeks crawled into this frame between 

584 I TH'E GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

the beams and the turbine and started a bonfire to get warm. 

The silver soldering on the blades melted-and they threw the 

turbine out. It cost 3,700,000 rubles. Now that's being selfsupporting 

for you! 

And in the presence of the zeks-and this was a second reason 

-the free employees didn't care either, as though they were 

working not for themselves but for some stranger or other, and 

. they stole a lot, they stole a great, great deal. (They were building 

an apartment building, and the free employees stole several bathtubs. 

But the tubs had been supplied to match the number of 

apartments. So how could they ,hand over the apartment building 

as completed? They could not confess to the construction superintendent, 

of course-he was triumphantly showing the official 

acceptance committee around the first stair landing, yes, and he 

did not omit to take them into every bathroom too and show them 

each tub. And then he took the committee to the second-floor 

landing, and the third, not hurrying there either, and kept going 

into all the bathrooms-and meanwhile the adroit and experienced 

zeks, under the leadership of an experienced foreman 

plumber, broke bathtubs out of the apartments on the first landing, 

hauled them upstairs on tiptoe to the fourth floor and hurrie41y 

installed and puttied them in before the committee's arrival. 

And it was their lookout jf they let the wool be pulled over their 

eyes. . .. This ought to be shown in a film comedy, but they 

wouldn't allow it: there is nothing funny in our life; everything 

funny takes place in the West!) 

The .third cause was the zeks' lack of independence, their inability 

to live without jailers, without a camp administration, 

without guards, without a camp perimeter complete with watchtowers, 

without a Planning and Production Section, a Records 

and Classification Section, a Security Operations Section, a Cultural 

and Educational Section, and without higher camp administrations 

right up to Gulag itself; without censorship, and without 

penalty isolators, without Strict Regimen Brigades, without trusties, 

without stockroom clerks and warehouses; their inability to 

move around without convoy and dogs. And so the stllte had to 

maintain at least one custodian for each working native (and 

every custodian had a family!). Well and good that it was so, 

but what were all these custodians to live on? 

And there were some bright engineers who pointed out a 

/'

.we Are Building I 585 

fourth reason· as well: that, so they claimed, the necessity of 

setting up a perimeter fence at every step, of strengthening the 

. convoy, of allotting a supplementary convoy, interfered with 

their, the engineers', technical maneuverability, as, for example, 

during the disembarkation on the. River Taz; and because of 

this, so they claimed, everything was done late and cost more. 

But this was already an objective reason, this was a pretext! 

Summon them to the Party bureau, give them a good SCOlding, 

and the cause will disappear. Let them break their heads;' they'll 

find a solution. 

' 

And then, beyond ail these reasons, there were the natural 

and fully condonable miscalculations of the Leadership itself. 

As Comrade Lenin said: Only the person who does nothing 

,makes no mistakes. 

' 

For eXample, no matter how earth-moving work was planned' 

-rarely did it take place in the summer, but always for some 

reason in the autumn and winter, in mud and in freezing weather . 

./ Or at the Zarosshy Spring in the Shturmovoi g~ldfields (the 

Kolyma) in March, 1938, they sent out five hundred people to 

drive prospecting shafts to a depth of twenty-five to thirty feet 

in the permafrost. They completed them. (Half the zeks kicked 

the bucket.) It was time to start blasting, but they changed tlteir 

minds: the metal content was low. They abandoned it. In May 

the prospecting shafts thawed, all the work was lost. And two 

years later, again in March, in the Kolyma frosts, they had another 

brainstorm: to drive prospecting shafts! In the yery same 

place! Urgently! Don't spare lives! 

Well, that's what superflqous expenditures are .... 

Or, on the Sukhona River near the settlement of Opoki-;-the 

prisoners hauled .earth and built a dam. And the spring freshets 

carried it away immediately. And that was that-gone. 

Or, for example, the Talaga logging operation of the Arch 

-angel administration was given a plan to produce furniture" but 

the authorities forgot to assign supplies of lumber with which to 

make the ~iture. But It plan is a plan, and has to be fulfilled! 

Talaga had to send out special brigades to fish driftwood out o{ 

the river-logs which had fallen behind ~he timber rafting. There 

was not enough. Then, in hit-and-run raids, they began to break 

up whole rafts and carry them off. But, after all, those rafts 

belonged to someone else in the plan, and now they wouldn) 

586 I THE GULAG ,ARCHIPELAGO 

have enough. And also it was quite impossible for Talaga to 

write up work sheets to pay those bold young fellows who had 

grabbed the timber; after all, it was thievery. So that's what selfsupport 

is .... 

Or once in UstVymlag (jn 1943) they wanted to overfulfiIl 

the plan for floating individual logs downstream, and brought 

pressure on the loggers, drove out all those able and unable, and 

accumulated too much timber in the timber-floating port-260,- 

000 cubic yards. They. didn't manage to fish it out before the 

winter and it froze into the Ice. And down below the harbor was 

a railroad bridge. If the timber did not break up into individual 

logs in the spring, and if it went off in a mass, it would wipe out 

the bridge, just like that, and the chief would be tried. And therefore 

they had to requisition whole carloads of dynamite, sink it 

to the bottom of the river, blow up the icebound log raft and then 

dragJhe logs ashore as quickly as possible--and bum them. (By 

spring they would not be ~sable as lumber.) The entire camp 

was occupied with this work, two hundred persons. For their 

work in the icy water they received a ration of fat bacon." But 

none of this could be covered by work vouchers, because it was 

all superfluous. And the burned-up timber-gone. Now that's 

what self-support is. 

All PechZh~lDorlag was engaged in constructing the railroad" 

to Vorkuta-winding every which way. And only afterward did 

they begin to straighten out the already built road. Who "paid for 

that? And the railroad from Lalsk on the River Luza to Pinyug 

(they even planned to extend it to Syktyvkar)? In 1938, what 

enormous camps were driven out there, and they built twentyeight 

miles of that railroad-and abandoned it. . . . And so it 

all went to waste. 

Well, of course, these small mistakes are inevitable in any 

work. No Leader is immune to them. " 

And all that railroad from Salekhard to Igarka started in 1949 

-after all, it all turned out ~o be superfluous. There was nothing 

there to be hauled on it. And they abandoned it too. But then 

one quails to say" whose mistake that was. It was, after all, His 

Own .... 

And sometimes they carried this business of self-support to 

such a length that the camp chief didn't know where to hide 

from it, how to tie up the loose ends. There was a camp for


invalid zeks at Kacha near Krasnoyarsk (fifteen hundred invalid 

zeks! ), which after the war was told to go over to self-support: 

to manufacture furniture. And these· invalids cut timber with 

bow saws. (It wasn't a logging camp-and no mechanical equipment 

was provided.) They hauled the timber to the camp @n 

cows. (Transportation was not provided either, but there was a 

dairy farm.) The cost of manufacturing a divan turned out to be 

eight hundred rubles, and its sale price-:-six hundred! . • . And 

thus the camp management itself had a material interest in transferring 

as many invalids as possible into Group 1, or else in classifying 

them as ill and not sending them out of the compound, for 

then -they would immediately shift from a debit balance on selfsupport 

to the reliable state bUdget. 

Due to all these causes not only does the Archipelago not pay 

its own way, but the nation has to pay dearly for the additional 

satisfaction of having it. 

The economic life of the Archipelago was also complicated 

by the fact that, even though this great statewide socialist selfsupport 

was needed by the entire state, and by Gulag too-yet 

.the chief of camp couldn't care less-so they might scold a bit, 

pinch off his bonus money (but they would give it to him anyway). 

The main income, and the main scope, the main convenience 

and satisfaction for every chief of an individual camp . . . 

was to have his own independent economy in kind, to have his 

own cozy little estate, a patrimony. As in the Red Army, .so, too, 

among the MVD officers, not at all as a joke, but very seriously, 

the circumstantial, respectful, proud, and pleasant· word, the 

"Master," developed and established 'itself firmly. Just as one 

Master stood way up on top above the entire country, so the 

commander of every individual subdivision necessarily had to 

be a Master too.'" 

But, given that cruel comb of Groups A, B, C, and D which 

the merciless Frenkel had stuck forever into Gulag's mane, the 

Master had to twist and turn cunningly in order to drag through 

that comb a sufficient number of workers, without whom the 

ymono~ of his patrimonial manor could in no wise be built. 

Wherever there was supposed to be one tailor. on Gulag tables 

of organization, it was necessary to construct an entire tailor 

shop, wherever one shoemaker, a whole shoemaker's shop, and 

S88 I THB~GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

how many other very useful kinds of craftsmen one would wish 

to have right at hand! Why, for example, should one not have 

hothouses, and hothouse greens for the ofic~' table? Sometimes, 

even, a wise chief would set up a large auxiliary vegetable f~m 

to feed vegetables over rations even to prisoners too. They would 

make up for it in work, it was simply quite advantageous for the 

Master himself, but where could he' get the people? 

But there was a way put ........ to overload all those same prisoner 

sloggers, and to deceive Gulag a little, and to cheat on the work 

a little too. For large-scale work inside camp, some construction 

project or other, all the prisoners could be compelled to work 

Sundays or evenings after their (ten-hour) workdays. For regular 

work, they inflated the statistics on brigades leaving the camp: 

workers remaining inside camp were listed as going out of it with 

their brigades to work. And the brigadiers had to bring back 

from there their percentages, in other words, part of the output 

stolen from the rest of the brigade members (who even so were 

not fulfilling the norms). The sIoggers worked harder and ate 

less-but the manor economy grew and strengthened, and the 

comrade officers had a less monotonous and pleasanter life. 

And· in certain camps the chief had great breadth of economic 

vision, and he also found an engineer with imagination-and a 

powerful "Khozdvor," a complex of workshops, grew in the 

compound, even with official documentation after a while, even 

with unconcealed staffs, and accepting industrial assignments for 

fulfillment. But it could not push its way into the planned supp!y 

of materials and tools, and therefore, having nothing, it had to 

make everything it required itself. 

Let us sp~ about one such Khozdvor-at the Kengir Camp. 

We won't mention the tailor, furrier, carpentry, and other auxiliary 

workshops-they are a mere bagatelle. The Kengir Khozdvor 

had its own foundry, its own metalworking shop, and even-in 

the middle of the twentieth century-manufactured hand-made 

drilling and grinding lathes! True, they were unable to manufacture 

their own turning lathe, but in this camp lend-lease was 

employed: a lathe was stolen in broad daylight from an industrial 

plant. Here's how it was arranged: They drove up a camp truck 

and waited till the chief of the plant section left-and then'a 

whole brigade hurled itself on the lathe, dragged it onto the truck, 

which had no trouble driving right on past the gatehouse guard, 

. because everything had been arranged with the guard-the


guards' battalion was also MVD-and then they drove the lathe 

right into the camp. and once in there none of the "volnyashki" 

had access to it. And that was that! What could you get out of 

the stupid. irresponsible natives? The chief of the section raged 

and beat his breast-where had the lathe gone? But the zeks 

knew nothing: What lathe? We didn't see any. And' the most 

important tools arrived in the camp in-the same way-but more 

easily. In the pocket or under overcoat flaps. 

The camp workShops once undertook to cast covers for sewer 

manholes for the ore enrichment factory of Kengir. They coul4 

do it, they found. But they ran out of pig iron~and where could 

the camp procure it in the last resort? So then the prisoners were 

given orders to steal some first-class- English cast-4'on brackets 

- (relics of the prerevolutionary concession) from thllt very same 

ore enrichment plant. In camp these were melted down-and carried 

off to the ore enrichment plant as manhole covers, for which 

.the camp was paid. 

And by this time the reader has come to understand how such 

an energetic "Kbozdvor" as this strengthened self-support and 

also the entire economy of the nation. 

And what was there that these camp workshops wouldn't 

undertake to manufactur~not even Krupp would have undertaken 

it all. They undertook to make large earthenware pipes for 

sewage disposal. A windmill. A chaff cutter. Locks. Water pumps. 

To repair meat grinders. To sew transmission belts. To mend 

sterilizers. for the hospital. To sharpen drills for trepanning the 

skull. After all, necessity is the mother of invention! When you 

. get good and hungry, you'll figure things out. After all, if you 

should say, "We aren't able to, we can't do it"-tomorrow they'll 

drive you out to general work; whereas in the camp workshops 

things are much more free and easy: no line-up, no marching 

under convoy, and you can work more slowly,' and make something 

'for yourself too. The hospital will pay for an order. with 

two days'. "sick leave," the kitchen with "something added.," 

someone else with makhorka, and the management will throw in 

a little government bread. 

And it's funny, and amusing. The engineers were constantly 

racking their brains: Out of what? How? A piece of suitable 

iron, found somewhere on the dump, often changed the entire 

planned design. They made a windmill, and they couldn't· find a 

spring to k~ it turned to the wind. They ~ to tie two' strings 


, 

to it and give orders to two zeks: When the wind changes, run 

and turn the mill with the two cords. And they made their own 

bricks too; with a metal wire, a woman cut a moving strip of 

clay the length of the future bricks, and they were carried farther 

on a conveyor which this woman had to keep moving. But with 

what? After all, her hands were occupied. Oh, immortal inventiveness 

of cunning zeks! They dreamed up a pair of shafts which 

hugged the woman's pelvis on either 'side, and while using her 

hands to cut the bricks, she simultaneously moved the conveyor 

belt with a strong and frequent motion of her pelvis back and 

forth! Alas, we are unable to show the reader a photograph of 

this. 

And the .. Kengir estate owner finally became convinced for 

once and for all that there was nothing in the world that his 

"Khozdvor" could not make. And one day he called in the chief 

engineer and ordered him to begin the production of glass for 

windows and carafes immediately. How to make it? They looked 

in a volume of the encyclopedia lying there. General phrases, 

no formula. Nonetheless they ordered soda, found quartz sand 

somewhere, and brought it in. And for the main thing-they 

asked their friends to bring them broken glass from the "new 

city under construction." They broke a lot there. They put all 

this into the stove. They melted it, mixed it, drew it 'out, and they 

got sheets of window glass! But at one end it was one centimeter 

thiclc and at the other it got as thin as two millimeters. To recognize 

even a good friend through window glass like that was quite 

impossible. And the time limit was approaching . . . to show 

the output to the chief. How does a zek live? One day at a time: 

H only I can get through today, I will somehow manage tomor- 

row. And so they stole manufactured window panes from the 

site, with the glass already cut, brought them to the camp workshops, 

and showed them to the camp chief. He was satisfied: 

"Good boys! It's just like the real thing! So now start mass pro- 

. duction!" "We can't make any more, Citizen Chief!~' "But why 

not?" "You see, window glass must have molybdenum. We had 

only a tiny bit and it is all used up." "Can't you get it anywhere?" 

"Nowhere." ''That's too bad. But can you make carafes without 

that molybdenum?" "We can probably make carafes." "Well, 

get going." But the carafes, too, all turned out lopsided, and for 

some reason they all broke apart. A jailer took one of these 

carafes to get milk, and he was left with just the neck in his hand,

We Are Building 591 

and the Iililk: spilled. "Oh, those bastards!" he cursed. "Wreckers! 

Fascists! You should all be shot!" 

When they were ·clearingspace for new buildings on Ogaryov 

Street in Moscow and they broke up the old ones, which had 

stood there for more than a century. not only did they not throw 

out the floor beams they. found there. or even use them for firewood-but 

they used them for woodwork! They. coDsisted of 

clean, ringing wood. That's what seasoning meant to our greatgrandfathers. 

we hurry at everything. We never have time for· anything. 

Does anyone think we should wait for beams to season? At 

Kaluga Gates we used to smear the. beams with the latest antiseptics-and 

the beams rotted all the same. and fungi appeared 

on them, and so quickly, too, that even before the buildings were 

officially turned over it was necessary to tear up the floors and 

replace the rafters as we went; 

Therefore, one hundred years from now everything. that we 

zeks built, and in all probability the whole country.as well. will 

not ring like those. old beams from Ogaryov Street. 

On that day when the U.S.S.R.. with truropets blaring. loosed 

into the heavens the first artificial earth sateUite-opposite my 

window in Ryazan two pairs· of free women. -dressed in dirty 

zek pea jackets and padded britches, were carrying cement up 

to the fourth floor in hand barrows; 

"True, true, that's so," they will object. "But what can you say? 

Nonetheless il orbits!' . 

And that you cannot take away -from il. the devil take it! It 

orbits! . 

• 

It would be appropriate to finish this chapter with a long list 

of the projects completed by the prisoners for at least the 

period from the beginning of the First Stalinist Five-Year Plan 

up to the time of Khrushchev. But I. of course, am not in a position 

to· compile that list, I can only begin it, so that those desiring 

to can make the necessary insertions and continue it. 

The Belomor Canal (1932) 

The Moscow-Volga Canal (1936) 

The Volga-Don Canal (1952) 


The Kotlas-Vorkuta Railroad, and the branch to Salekhard 

The Rikasikha-Molotovsk Railroad 1 

The Salekhard-Igarka Railroad (abandoned) 

The Lalsk-Pinyug Railroad (abandoned) 

The Karaganda-Mointy-Balkhash Railroad (1936) 

The Volga River Right-Bank Railroad 

The lateral railroads' paralleling the Finnish and Iranian borders 

The Trans~Siberian second tracks (1933-1935, about 2,500 

, Jniles) 

The Taishet-Lena Railroad (the beginning of BAM) 

The Komsomolsk-Sovetskaya Gavan Railroad 

The Sakhalin Railroad from Pobedino to join the Japanese 

network 

The railroad, to Ulan-Bator, and highways in Mongolia 8 

The Minsk-Moscow highway (1937-1938) 

Tne Nogayevo-Atka-Nera highway 

Construction of the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station 

Construction of the Lower Tuloma Hydroelectric Station 

(near Murmansk) 

Construction of the Ust-Kamenogorsk Hydroelectric Station 

Construction - of the Balkhash Copper Smelting Complex 

(1934-1935) 

Construction of the Solikamsk Paper Combine 

Construction of the Berezniki Chemical Complex 

Construction of the Magnitogorsk Complex (in part) 

Construction of the Kuznetsk Comphix (in part) 

Construction of factories and open hearths 

Construction of the Lomonosov Moscow State University 

(1950-1953, in part) 

Construction of the city of Komsomolsk-on-the~AmUr 

Construction of the city 'of Sovetskaya Gavan 

Construction of the city of Magadan 

Construction of the city of Norilsk 

(' Construction of the city of Dudinka 

7. Camps on the Kudrna River. on Yagry Island. in the Rikasikha settlement. 

8. During the construction of this railroad the unguarded prisoners were 

ordered to tell the Mongols that they were Komsomol members and volunteers. 

When the Mongols heard this. they replied: Take back your railroad. give us 

back our sheep.


Construction of the city of Vorkuta 

Construction of the city of Molotovsk: (Severodvinsk) (1935 

on) 

no~curtsnoC of the city of Dubna 

Construction of the port of Nakhodka 

Construction of the pipeline from Sakhalin to the mainland 

Construction of nearly all the centers of nuclear industry 

Mining of radioactive elements (uranium and radium-near 

Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk:, and Tura) 

Work on isotope separation and enrichment plants (1945- 

1948) 

mu~ mining in Ukhta; petroleum refining in Ukhta; the 

manufacture of heavy water 

Cpal mining in the basins of the Pechora and the Kuznetsk, of 

the deposits at Karaganda and Suchan, etc. 

Ore mining in Dzhezkazgan, Southern Siberia, Buryai-Mongolia, 

Shoriya,' Khakasaiy~ ,and on the Kola Peninsula . 

Gold mining on the Kolyma, in Chukotka, in Yakutia, on 

-' Vaigach Island, in Maikain (Bayan-Aul diStrict) 

Apatite mining on the Kola Peninsula (1930 on) 

Fluorspar mining in Amderma (1936 on) 

Rare-metals mining (the "Stalinskoye" ore deposit in Akmolinsk 

Province) (up to the fifties) " 

Timber cutting for export and for internal needs. All the 

European Russian North and Siberia. We are not able to 

enumerate th~ countless logging camps. They constituted 

half the Archipelago. We will realize this with the very first 

listing of names: the camps on the River Koin; on the Uftyuga 

Dvinskaya River; on the River Nem, a tributary of 

the Vychegda (exiled Germans); on the Vychegda near 

Ryabova; on the Northern Dvina near Cherevkovo; on the 

Lesser Northern Dvil!a near Aristovo .•.. 

But is it possible to draw up such a list? ... O~ what maps or . 

in whose memory have all these thousands of temporary lopg 

camps been preserved, camps-established for one year, for two, 

for three, until all the woods nearby had been cut, and then removed 

lock, stock, and barrel? And then why only 'the logging 

camps? What about a complete list of all the little islands of the ' 

Archipelago which ever surfaced-the famous camps lasting 


for decades, and the migratory camps following the line of a 

construction route, and powerful central prisons for long-termers, 

and transit camps made of tents and poles? And would anyone 

undertake to place on such a map all the preliminary detention 

cells and prisons in each city (several in each)'! And then, too, 

the agricultural colonies with their haying and their herding 

outposts? And, in addition, the tiny industrial and construction 

colonies scattered like seeds through the cities? Moscow and 

Leningrad would each have to have enclaves marked throughout 

them on a large-scale map. (Do not forget the camp located a 

quarter-mile from the Kremlin-the beginning of the construction 

of the Palace of the Soviets. ) Yes, and in the twenties the 

Archipelago was one thing, whereas in the fifties it was quite a 

different thing and in quite different places. How would one 

indicate its march through time? How many maps would be 

required? And Nyroblag, or UstVymlag, or the Solikamsk or the 

Potma camps would have to be a whole province of crosshatching 

-but who among us ever walked those boundaries? 

But we hope to see such a map yet. 

Loading of timber onto ships in Karelia (till 1930; after the 

appeal of the English press not to accept timber loaded by 

prisoners, the zeks were hastily taken off this work and removed 

to the inner depths of Karelia) 

Supplying the front during wartime with mines, ammunition, 

packing for them, and with uniforms 

The construction of state farms in Siberia and Kazakhstan 

And even leaving out the whole of the twenties, and the output 

of prisons, reformatories, and corrective-labor prisons, what 

was it that the hundreds of industrial colonies spent their time 

on, what did they manufacture in the quarter-century from 1929 

to 1953? There was no decent city in the whole country that did 

not have them. 

And what did the hundreds and hundreds of agricultural colonies 

grow and harvest? 

It is indeed much easier to enumerate the occupations the prisoners 

never did have: the manufacture of sausages and confectionary 

goods. 

END OF PART III

PART IV 

The Soul and Barbed Wire 

• 

. ''Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not 

aU_ sleep, ·but we shall all be changed." 

I Corinthians, 15:51*


Chapter 1 

• 

The Ascent 

And the years go by ..•. 

Not in swift staccato, as they joke in camp--''winter-summer, 

winter-summer"-but a 19n9-drawn-out autumn, an endless 

winter, an unwilling spring, and only a summer that is sbort. In 

the ArchiJl!'lago ... summer is short. 

Even one mere year, whew, how long it laSts! Even in one 

year hQW much time is left for you to think! For 330 days you 

stomp out to line-up in a drizzling, slushy rain, and in a piercing 

blizzard, and in a biting and still subzero cold. For 330 days 

you work away at hateful,. alien work with your mind unoccupied. 

For 330 evenings you squinch up, wet, chilled, in the endof-work 

lin~up; waiting for the convoy to assemble from the 

distant watchtowers. And then there is the march out, And the 

march back. And bending down over 730 bowls of gruel, over 

730 portions of grits. Y~, and waking up and going to sleep on 

your multiple bunk. And neither radio nor books to distract you. 

There are none, and thank God. 

And that is only one year. And there are ten. There are 

twenty-five. . . . - 

And then, too, when you are lying in the hospital with dys 

. trophy-that, too, is a good time-to think. 

Think! Draw some conclusions from misfortune. 

And all' that endless time, after all, the prisoners' brains and 

. souls are not inactive?! In 'the mass and from a distance they 

seem like swarming lice, but they are the crown of creation, right? 

After all, once upon a time a weak little spark of God was 

597 

breathed into them too-is it not true? So what has become 

of it now? 

For centuries it was considered that a criminal was given a 

sentence for precisely this purpose, to think about his crime for 

. the whole period of his sentence .. be conscience-stricken,' repent, 

and gradually reform. 

But the Gulag Archipelago knows no pangs of conscience! 

Out of one hundred natives--five are thieves, and their transgressions 

are no reproach in their own eyes, but.a mark of valor. 

They dream of carrying out such feats in the future even more 

brazenly and cleverly. They have nothing to repent. ADother 

five . . . stole on a big scale, but not from people; in, our times, 

the only place where one can steal on a big scale is from the 

state, which itself squanders the people's mon~y without pity or 

. sense--so what was there for such types to repent of? Maybe 

that they had not stolen. more and .. divvied up-and dius remained 

free? And, so far ·as another 85 percent of the natives . 

were concerned-they had never comJnitted any crimes whatever. 

What were they supposed to repent of? That they had 

thought what they thought? (Nonetheless, they managed to 

pound and muddle some of them to such an extent that they 

did repent-of being so depraved. . . ; Let us remember the 

desperation of Nina Peregud because she was unworthy of ZOya 

Kosmodemyanskaya.)Or that a man had surrendered and become 

a POW in a hopeless situation? Or that he had taken employment 

under the Germans inst~ad of dying of starvation? 

(Nonetheless, they managed so to confuse what was permitted 

and what was forbidden that there were some such who were 

tormented greatly: I would have done better to die than to have 

earned that bread.) Or that while working for nothing in the 

collective-farm fields, he had taken. a mite to feed his children? 

Or that he had taken something from a factory for the same reason? 

No, not only do you not repent, but your clean conscience, like 

a clear moun:tain lake, shines in your eyes. (And your eyes, 

purified by suffering, infallibly perceive the least haze in other 

eyes; for example, they infallibly pick out stool pigeons. And the 

Cheka-GB is not aware of this capacity of oUrs to see with the 

eyes of truth-it ~ our "secret weapon" against that institution. 

And S.tate Security slips up here with us.)

The Ascent I 599 

It was in this nearly unanimous consciousness of our innocence 

that the main distinction arose between us and the hardlabor 

prisoners of Dostoye:vsky, the hard-labor prisoners of 

P. Yakubovich. There they were conscious of being doomed 

renegades, whereas we were confidently aware that they could 

haul in any free person at all in just the same way they had 

hauled us in; that barbed wire was only a nominal dividing line 

between us. In earlier times there had been among the majority 

... the unconditional consciousness of personal guilt, and among 

us . . . the consciousness of disaster on a mammoth scale. 

Just not to perish from the disaster! It had to be survived. ' 

Wasn't this the root cause of the astounding rarity of camp 

suicides? Yes, rarity, although every ex-prisoner could in all 

. probability recall a case of suic;:ide. But he could recall even 

more escapes. There were certainly more escapes than suicides! 

(Admirers of socialist realism can praise me: I am pursuing an 

optimistic line.) And there were far more self-inflicted injuries, 

too, than·there were suicides! But this, too, is an act indicating 

love of life-a straightforward calculation of sacrificing _ a 

portion to save the whole. I even imagine that, statistically speaking, 

there were fewer suicides per thousand of the population 

. in camp than in freedom. I have no way of verifying this, of 

course. 

But Skripnikova recalls how a man thirty years old hanged 

himself in 1931 in the women's toilet in Medvezhyegorsk-and 

hanged himself on the very day he was to be released! So maybe 

it was out of a feeling of disgust for the freedom of that time? 

(Two years earlier his wife had abandoned him, but he had not 

hanged himself then.) Well, the designer Voronov hanged himself 

in the club of the main camp center of Burepolom. The 

Communist Party official Aramovich, a second-termer, hanged 

himself in 1947 in the garret of the machinery-repair factory in 

Knyazh-Pogost. In Kraslag during the war years Lithuanians 

who had been reduced to a state of total despair-mainly because 

nothing in their former lives had prepared them for our 

cruelties--marched on infantrymen so as to get themselves shot 

down. In 1949, in the interrogation cell in Vladimir-Volynsk, a 

young fellow stunned by his interrogation tried to hang himself, 

but BQrO'nyuk pulled him down in time. At the Kaluga Gates a 

former Latvian officer who was hospitaliied in the camp infirm- 


ary began to creep stealthily up some stairs-they led to the 

incomplete, empty upper stories. The "zechka" nurse saw him 

and went in pursuit. She caught up with him on the open balcony 

of the sixth floor. She caught him by the bathrobe, but the 

suicide slipped off the robe and stepped off into nothingness 

dressed in his underwear-and flashed past like a white streak 

of lightning in plaiD. sigllt of busy Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street 

on a sunny summer day. When Emmi, a German Communist, 

learned about her husband's death,. she left the barracks in subzero 

weather undressed so as to ca~ch cold. The Englishman 

Kelly, in the Vladimir Special Purpose Prison, very skillfully 

cut his veins with the door wide open and the jailer right there 

on the threshold. 1 

I repeat: there are many others who can recount similar cases 

-but nonetheless, out of tens of millions who have served time, 

their, total number will be small. Even among these examples, 

it is clear that a much greater proportion of s.J,Jicides. is accounted 

for by foreigners, Westerners; for them the transition to the 

. Archipelago . . . was a more shattering blow than· for us, so 

they put an end to it. And suicides were frequent among the 

loyalists too (but not among the hard-heads). And one can 

understand why-after all, their heads must have got thoroughly 

mixed up and filled with incessant buzzing. How could they 

stand it? (Zosia Zaleska, a Polish noblewoman who had devoted 

her entire life to the "cause of Communism" by serving in the _ 

Soviet intelligence service, tried to commit suicide three times 

during her interrogation: she tried to hang herself-they pulled 

her down; she cut her veins-but they stopped her; she jumped 

onto the window sill on the seventh floor-but the drowsy interrogator 

managed to grab hold of her by her dress. They saved 

her life three times-so they could shoot her.) ~. 

And, anyway, what is the ((Orrect interpretation of suicide? 

Ans Be(1lShtein, for example, insists that suicides are not at all 

cowards, that great will power is required for suicide. He him 

. self wove a rope out of bandages and throttled himself by lifting 

his feet off the floor. But green circles appeared before his eyes 

and there was a ringing in his ears-and each time he involun- 

1. He did it with a piece of enamel from the washbasin. Kelly hid it in his 

shoe and his shoe stood by his bed. Kelly dropped his blanket over the shoe to 

cover it, got out the piece of enamel, and cut his wrist vein beneath the blanket.


tarily put his feet back ,on the ground. During his last try the 

homemade rope broke-and he felt glad that he was still alive. 

I am not going to dispute that perhaps even in the most extreme 

despair you still need will power to commit suicide. For a 

long time I would not have taken it upon myself to pass judgment 

on this at all. All my life long I was absolutely convinced that 

I would never consider suicide in any circumstances whatever. 

But not so long ago I dragged my way through gl90my months 

when it seemed to me that my whole life's cause had perished, 

especially if I remained alive. And I remember very clearly 

indeed the revulsion against life that came over me and the 

sensation that to die . . . was easier than to live. In my opinion, 

in a'state like that it requires more strength of will to stay alive 

than to die. But, in all probability, with other people, in a different 

extremity, this turns out differently. And that is why 

from time immemorial the two opinions have existed. 

It is a very spectacular idea to imagine all the inhocently 

outraged millions beginning to commit suicide en masse, causing 

double vexation to the government-both by demonstrating their 

innocence and by depriving the government of free manpower. 

And maybe the government would have had to soften up and 

begin to take pity on its subjects?-well, hardly! Stalin wouldn't 

have been stopped by that. He would have merely picked up 

another twenty million people from freedom. 

But it did not happen! People died by the hundreds of thousands 

and milions~ driven, it w~uld seem, to the extremity of 

extremities-but for some reason there were no suicides! Condemned 

to a misshapen existence, to waste away from starvation, 

to exhaustion from labor-fJley did not put an end to themselves! 

And thinking the whole thing over,.! found that proof to be 

the stronger. A suicide is always a bankrupt, always a human 

being in a blind alley, a human being who has gambled his life 

and lost and is without the will to continue the struggle. If these 

millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end 

to themselves-this meant some kind of invincible feeling was 

alive inside them. Some very powerful idea. 

This was their feeling of universal innocence. It was the sense 

of an ordeal of the entire people-like the Tatar yoke. 


• 

But what if one has nothing to repent of-what then, what then 

does the prisoner think about all the time?, "Poverty and prison 

•.. give wisdom." They do. But-where is it to be directed? 

Here is how it was with many others, not just with me. Our 

initial, first prison sky consisted of black swirling storm clouds 

and black pillars of volcanic ,eruptions-this was the heaven of 

Pompeii, the heaven of the Day of Judgment, beca~ it was 

not just anyone who had been ~ted, but I-the center of 

this world. ' 

Our last prison sky was infinitely high, infinitely clear, even 

paler than sky-blue. 

We all (except religious believers) began from one point: 

we tried to tear our hair from our head, but our hair had been 

clipped close! . • . How could we? How could we not have seen 

those who informed against us?! How could we not have seen 

our enemies? (And how we hated them! liow could we avenge 

ourselves on them?) And what recklessness! What blindness! 

How m~y errors! How can they be corrected?' They must be 

corrected all the more swiftly! 'We must write ...• We must 

speak out. ... We must communicate .... 

But-there is nothing that we can do. And nothing is going 

to save us! At the appropriate time we will sign Form 206. 

At the appropriate time the tribUnal will read us our sentence 

in our presence, or we will learn it in absentia from the OSO. " 

Then there begins the period of transit prisons. Interspersed 

with our thoughts about our future camp, we now love to recall 

, our past: How weli we used to live! (Even if we lived badly.) 

But how many unused opportunities there were! How many 

flowers we left uncrumpled! ... When will, we now make up for 

it? H I only manage to survive-:-oh; how' differently, how 

wisely, I am going to live! The day of our future release? It 

shines like a rising sun! 

And the conclusion is: Survive to reach it! Survive! At any 

price! 

' 

This is simply a turn of phrase, a sort of habit of' speech: 

"at any price." 

But then the words swell up with their full meaning, and ,an 

awesome vow takes shape: to survive at any price.


And whoever takes that vow, whoever does not blink before 

its -crimson burst-allows his own misfortune to overshadow 

both the entire common misfortune and the whole world : 

This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads 

go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the 

other will descend. H you go to the' right-you lose your life, 

and if you go to the left-you lose your conscience . 

. . One's own order to oneself, "Survive!," is the natural splash 

of a living person. Who does not wish to survive? Who does not 

have the right to survive? Straining all the strength of our body! 

. An order to all our cells: Survive! A powerful charge is introduced 

into the chest cavity, and the heart is surrounded by an 

electrical cloud so as not to stop beating. They lead thirty 

emaciated but wjry zeks three miles across the Arctic ice to a 

bathhouse. The bath is not worth even a warm word. Six men 

at a time wash themselves in five shifts, and the door opens 

straight into the subzero temperature, and fout shifts are obliged 

to stand there before or after bathing-because they cannot be 

left without convoy. And not.only does none of them get pneumonia. 

They don't even catch cold. (And for ten years one old 

man had his bath just like that, serving out his term from age 

fifty to sixty. But then he was released, he was at home. Warm 

and cared for, he burned up in one month's time. That order 

"Survive!"-was not there ....) 

But simply "to survive" does not yet mean "at any price." 

"At any price" means: at the price of someone else. _ 

Let us admit the truth: At that great fork in the camp road, 

at that great divider of souls, it was not the majority of the· 

prisoners that turned to the right. Alas, not ~e majority. But 

fortunately neither was it just a few. -There are many of themhuman 

beings-who made this choice. But they did ~ot shout 

about themselves. You had to look closely to see them. Dozens 

of times this same choice had arisen before them too, but they 

always knew, and mew their own stand. 

Take Arnold Susi, who was sent to camp at the age of about 

fifty. He had never been a believer, but he had always been 

fundamentally decent, he had never led any other kind of life- 

and he was not about to begin any other. He was a "Westerner." 

And what that meant was that he was doubly unprepared, and 

kept putting his foot into it all the time, and getting into serious 

difficulties. He worked at general work. And he was imprisoned 


in a penalty camp-and he·still managed to survive; he survived 

as exactly the same kind of person he had been when he came to 

camp. I knew him at the very beginning, and I knew him . . . 

afterward, and I can testify personally. True, there were three 

seriously mitigating circumstances which . accompanied him 

throughout his camp life: He was classified as an invalid. For 

several years he received parcels. And thanks to his musical 

abilities, he got some additional nourishment out of amateur 

theatricals. But .these three circumstances only explain why he 

survived. If they had not existed, he would have died. But he 

would not have changed. (And perhaps those who died did die 

because they did not change?) 

And Tarashkevich, a perfectly ordinary, straightforward person, 

recalls: "There were many prisoners prepared to grovel for 

a bread ration or a puff of makhorka smoke. I was dying, but 

I kept my soul pure: I always called a spade a spade." 

It has been known for many centuries that prison causes the 

profound rebirth of a human being. The examples are innumerable-such 

as that of Silvio Pellico: Through serving eight 

years he was transformed from a furious Carbonaro to a meek 

Roman Catholic. 2 In our country they always mention Dostoyevsky 

in this respect. And what about Pisarev? What remained 

of his revolutionary rebelliousness after imprisonment in the 

re~P and Paul Fortress? One can certainly debate whether this 

is good for revolution, but these transformations always proceed 

in the direction of deepening the soul. Ibsen wrote: "From lack 

of oxygen even the conscience will wither."s 

By no means! It is not by any means so simple! In fact, it is 

the opposite! Take General Gorbatov: He had fought from his 

very youth, advanced through the ranks of the army, and had 

no time at all in which to think about things. But he was imprisoned, 

and how good it was-various events awakened WIthin 

his recollection, such as his having suspected an innocent man 

of espionage; or his having ordered by mistake the execution of a 

quite innocent Pole. 4 (Well, when else would he have remembered 

this? After rehabilitation he did not remember such things 

very much?) Enough has been written about prisoners' changes 

2. S. Pellico, Moi Temnitsy (My Prisons), St. Petersburg, 1836. 

3. Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People. 

4. Novy~Mir, 1964, No.4. 

•

The Ascent I 60S 

of heart to raise it to the level of penological theory. For example, 

in the prerevolutionary Prison Herald Luchenetsky wrote: "Dark- . 

ness renders a person more sensitive to light; involuntary inactivity 

in imprisonment arouses in him a thirst for life, movement, 

work; the quiet compels profound pondering over his own 'I,' 

over surrounding conditions, over his own past and present, and 

forces him to think about his future." 

Our teachers, 'who had never served time themselves, felt for 

prisoners only the natural sympathy of the outsider; Dostoyevsky, 

however, who served time himself, was a proponent of punishment! 

And this is something worth thinking about. 

The proverb says: "Freedom spoils, and "lack of freedom 

teaches." 

But Pellico 8nd Luchenetsky wrote about prison. But Dostoyevsky 

demanded· punishment-in prison .. But what kind of 

lack of freedom is it that educates? 

Camp? 

That is something to think about. 

Of course, in comparison with prison our camps are poisonous 

and harmful. 

Of course, they were not concerned with our souls when they. 

pumped up the Archipelago. But nonetheless: is it really hopeless 

to stand fast in camp? 

And more than that: was it really impossible for one's soul 

to rise in camp? 

Here is E.K., who was born around 1940, one of those boys 

who, under Khrushchev, gathered to read poems on Mayakovsky 

Square, but were hauled off instead in Black Marias. From camp, 

from a Potma camp, he Writes to his girl: "Here all the trivia and 

fuss have decreased .••. 1 have experienced a turning point ..•• 

Here you harken to that voice deep inside you,which amid the 

surleit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside." 

At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group· of intellectuals had 

reached the w:ry brink of death: They were worn down by' 

hunger, cold, and work beyond their "POWers. And the~ were even 

deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie dOWD~ Dt:4g0ut barracks 

had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? 

Or whimper about their .ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach 

of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they 

spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: 


Timofeyev-Ressovsky ~athered them ~to a "seminar," and they 

hastened to share with 'one another what one of them knew and 

the others did not-they delivered their last lectures to each 

other. Father Savely-spoke of "unshameful death," a priest 

academician-about patristics, one of . the Uniate fathersabout 

something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, 

. an electrical engineer-on the principles of the energetics 

of the future, and a Leningrad economist-on how the effort 

to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of 

new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles 

of microphysics. Froll!. one session to the next, participants 

were missing-they were already in the morgue. 

That is the sort of person who can be interested in all this 

while already growing numb with approaching death-now 

that is an intellectual! 

Pardon me, you ... love life? You, you! You who exclaim 

and sing over and ovec and dance it too: "I love you, life! Oh, I 

love you, life!" Do you? Well, go on, love it! Camp life-love 

that too! It, too, is life! 

There where there is no struggle with fate, 

There you will resurrect your soul .... 

You haven't understood a thing. When you get there, you'll 

collapse. 

Along our chosen road are twists and turns and twists and 

turns. Uphill? Or up into the heavens? Let's go, let's stumble 

and stagger. 

The day of liberation! What can it give us after so many 

years? We will change unrecognizably and so will our near and 

dear ones--and places which once were dear to us will seem 

stranger than strange. ' 

And the thought of freedom after a time even becomes a 

forced thought. Farfetched. Strange. 

The day of "liberation"! As if there were any liberty in this 

countryt Or as if it were possible to liberate anyone who has 

not first become liberated in h1s own soul. 

The stones roll doWn from under .our feet. Downward, into 

the past! They are the ashes of the past! 

And we ascend!


• 

It is a good thing to think in prison, but it is not bad in camp 

either. Because, and this is the main thing, there are no meetings. 

For ~n years you are free from all kinds of meetings! Is -that 

not mountain air? While they openly claim your labor and your 

body, to the point of exhaustion and even death, the camp ke~ 

ers _ do not encroach at all on your thoughts. They do not try - 

to screw down your brains and to fasten them in place.· And thiS 

results in a sensation of freedom of much greater magnitude 

_ than the freedom of one~s feet to run along on the level. 

_ No one tries to persuade. you to apply for Party membership. 

No one comes around to squeeze membership dues out of you 

in voluntary societies. There is no trade union-the same !Qnd of 

protector of your interests as an official lawyer before_a' tribunal. 

And there are no "production meetings;" You 'camiot 

be elected to any .position. You cannot be appointed some kind 

of delegate. And the really important thing is . . . that they 

to~c compel you to be a propagandist. Nor-to listen to 

propaganda. Nor-when someone jerks the string, to shout: 

"We demand! ... We will not :permitl ..." Nor-will they 

ever drag you off to the electoral precinct to vote freely and 

secretly for a single candidate. No one requires any "sOt;ialist 

Ulidertakings" of you. Nor-self -cpticism of your mistakes: Nor 

':""articles in the wall newspaper. Nor-an intervie.w with a provincial 

correspondent. 

A free -head-:-now is that not an advantage of life in -the 

Archipelago? 

And there is one more freedom: No one ~an deprive you of, . 

your family and property-:-you have already.been deprived of 

them. What does not exist-not even God can take away. And 

this is a basic freedom. 

It is good -to think in imprisonment. And th~ most insignificimt 

cause gives you a push in the direction of extenc:led 

and important thoughts. Once in a long, long while, once in 

three years maybe, they brought. a movie to _ camp. The film 

turned out to be--the cheapest pnd of "sports" comedy-The 

5. Except for the unfortunate period of the White Sea-Baltic Canai and the 

MOSCOW-Volsa Canal. 

• 


First Glove. * It was a bore. But from the screen they .kept 

drumming into the audience the moral of the film: 

The resiJIt is what counts, and the resUlt is not in your favor. 

On the screen they' kept laughing. In the hall the audience 

kept laughing too. But blinking as you c~e out into the sunlit 

. camp yard, you kept thinking about this phrase. And during 

the evening you kept·thinking about it on your bunk. And Monday 

morning out in line-up. And you cowd keep thinking about 

it as long as you wapted. And where else could you have concentrated 

on it like that? And slow clarity desCended into your 

bniliL 

' 

This was no joke. This 'was an infectious thought. It has long 

since been inculcated in our Fatherland-and they keep on 

inculcating it over and over. The concept that only the material 

result counts has become so much a part of us that when, for 

example, some Tukhachevsky, Yagoda, or Zinoviev was proclaimed 

... a traitor who had sidled up to the ·enemy, people 

only exclaimed in a chorus of astonishDient: "What more could 

he want?" .' 

Now that is a high moral plane for you! Now that is a real 

unit of measure. for you! ''What more could he want?" Since he 

had a belly full of chow, and twenty suits, and two country 

homes, an~ an automobile, and an airplane, and fame--what 

more could he want?!! Millions of our ~mpatriots find it unthinkable 

to imagine that a human being (and I am not speaking 

here of this particular trio) might have b~en motivated by. 

something other than material gain! 

To such an extent has everyone been indoc$ated with and 

absorbed the slogan: ''The result is what counts." - 

Whence did this come -to us? 

In the first place--from the glory of our banners and the socalled 

"honor of our Motherland." We choked, cut down, and 

cut up all our neighbors in our expansion-and in our Fatherland 

it became well established that: The result is what counts. 

And. then from our Demidovs, Kabans and Tsybukins. They 

clambered up, without looking behind them to see whose ears 

they were smashing with their jackboots. And ever more firmly 

it became established among a. once pious and openhearted 

people: The result is what counts. .


And then-from all kinds of socialists, and most of all from 

the most modem, infallible, and intolerant Teaching, which 

consists of this one thing only: The result is what counts! It is 

important to forge a fighting Party! And to seize power! And . 

to hold. on to power! And to remove all enemies! And to con- 

- quer in pig iron and steel! And to launch rockets! 

And though for this industry and for these rockets it was 

necessary to sacrifict; the way of life, and the integrity of the 

family, and the spiritual health of the people, and the very soul 

of our fields and forests and rivers-to hell with them! The result 

is what counts!!! 

But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our .backs for 

years at All-Union hard labor. Here in slow annual spirals we 

have been climbing up to an understanding of life---lPld from 

this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that 

counts! It is not the result~but the spirit! Not what-but 

how. Not what has been attained-but at what price. 

And so it. is with us the prisoners-if it is the result which 

counts, then it is also true that one must sumve at any price. 

And what that means is: One must become a stool pigeon, betray 

one's comrades. And thereby ~et oneself set up comfortably. 

And perhaps even get time off sentence. In the light of the In 

. fallible Teaching there is, evidently, nothing reprehensible in 

this. After al~ if one does that, then the result will be in our 

favor, and the result is what counts. 

No one is going to argue. It is pleaSant to win. But not at 

the price of losing one's human countenance. . 

H it is the result which counts-you. must strain every nerve 

and sinew to avoid general work. You must bend down, be 

servile, act meanly-yet hang on to your position as a trusty. 

And by this means . . . survive. 

H it is the essence that counts, then the time has come to 

. reconcile yourself to general work. To tatters. To tom skin on 

the hands. To a piece of bread which is smaller and worse. And 

perhaps ... to death. But while you're alive, you drag your way 

along proudly with an aching back. And that is when-when . 

you have ceased to be afraid of threats and are not chasing after 

rewards-you become the most dangerous character in the owllike 

view of the ~. Beca~ ... what hold do they have on 

you? . 


You even begin to like carrying hand barrows with rubbish 

(yes, but not with stone!) and discussing with your work mate 

how the movies influence literature-. You begin to like sitting 

down on the empty cement mixing trough and lighting up a 

smoke next to your bricklaying. And you are actually and simply 

proud if, when the foreman passes"you, he squints at your courses, 

checks their alignment with the rest of the wall, and says: "Did 

you lay that? Good line." 

You need that wall like you need a hole in the head, nor do 

you believe it is going "to bring closer the happy future of the 

people, but, pitiful tattered slave that you are, you smile at this 

creation of your own hands. 

The Anarchist's daughter, Galya Venediktova, worked as a 

nijtse in the Medical Section, but when she saw that what went 

on there was not healing but only the busineSs of getting fixed 

up in a good spot-out of stubbornness she left and went oft' to 

general work, taking up a spade and a Sledge hammer. And she 

says that this saved her spiritually. 

For a good person even a crust is healthy food, and to an 

evil person even meat brings no benefit. 

(Now that is no doubt how it really is-but what if there 

is not even a crust? . . .. ) 

• 

And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at 

any price," and gone where the calm and simple people gothen 

imprisonment begins to trarisform your fonner character in 

an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected 

to you. 

And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the 

disturbance "of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and 

nervousness ought to multiply.6 But you yourself do not notice 

how, with the impalpable flow of time, sll!,very nurtur~ in you 

e~ shoots of contradictory feelings. 

6. The revolutionaries of the past left many traces of this. Serafimovich; in 

one of his stories, describes the society of the exiles in this way. The Bolshevik 

olDiinsky writes: "Bitterness and spite-these feelings are so familiar to the 

prisoner, so close to his soul." He used to pour out his anger on those who 

came to visit him. He writes that he lost all taste for work too. But then the 

Russian revolutionaries (in the overwhelming mass) did not get and did not 

serve out any real (long) sentences.

The Ascent 611 

Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly 

in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And 

now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with 

its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you-and a 

beneficial calming fluid· pours through your blood vessels-- 

patience. / 

You ate ascending .... 

Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without 

mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderatipn. 

And now an understanding mildness has become the basis 

. of your uncategoncal judgments. You have conie to realize 

your own weakness-and you can therefore understand the 

weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. 

And wish to possess it yourself. 

The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending ...• 

With the yearS,armor-plated restraint covers your heart and 

all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not 

hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for 

easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good 

tidings nor do they darken with grief. 

For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going 

to be. And you also have to work out-what is gladnCl!s and 

what is grief. 

And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when 

you have found, do not weep when you have lost. 

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering. 

And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the 

Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to 

you . 

. Those' close to you inspirit who surround you in slavery. 

And how many of us come to realize: It is particularly in slavery 

that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine 

friendship! 

And also those close to you in blood, who surrounded you 

in your former life, who loved you-while you played the tyrant 

over them. . . . 

Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your 

thoughts: Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything 

you did that was bad and shameful and take thoughtcan't 

you possibly correct it now? 

612 I -TH.E GULAG AllCHIPELAGO 

Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing 

to rePent of before the state and its laws. . 

But ... before your-own conscience? But ... in relation-to 

other individuals? 

. . • Following an operation, I am lying in the surgical ward 

of a camp hospital. I cannot move. I am hot and feverish, but 

nonetheless my thoughts do not dissolve into delirium-and I 

am grateful to Dr. Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who is sitting 

beside my cot and ta1king to me all evening. The light has been 

turned out-so it Win not hurt my eyes. He and I-and there 

is no one else in the ward. 

Fervently he tells ,me the long story of his conversion from 

Judaism to Christianity. This conversion was accomplished by 

an educated, cultivated person, one of his cellmates, some goodnatured 

-old fellow like Platon Karatayev. I am astonished at the 

conviction of the new convert, at the ardor of his words. 

We know each other very slightly, and he was not the one 

responsible for my treatment, but there was simply no one here 

with whom he could share his feelings. He was a gentle and 

well-mannered person. I could see nothing bad in him nor did 

I know anything bad about him. However, I was on guard because 

Kornfeld had now been living for two months in the hospital 

barracks without going outside, because he had shut himself 

up in here, at his place of work, and avoided moving around 

camp· at all. . 

This meant . . . he was afraid of having his throat cut. In 

. our camp it had recently become fashionable--to cut the throats 

of stool pigeons. This has an effect But who could guarantee 

that orily stoolies were ge~g. their throats cut? One prisoner 

had had his throat cut in a clear case of settling a sordid grudge. 

And therefore . . . the self:imprisonment of Kornfeld in the 

hospital did not yet prove at all that he was a stool pigeon. 

It is already late. All the hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is ending 

up his story thus:· 

"And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced 

that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on 

earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to 

do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over 

your lif.e with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will 

always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for 

which you have now received this blow."


I cannot see his. face. Through the window come only the 

scattered reflections of the lights of the perimeter outside. And 

the door from the corridor gleams in a yellow electrical glow. 

But there is such mystical knowledge in his voice that I shudder. 

These were the last words of Boris Kornfeld. Noiselessly he 

went out into the nighttime corridor and into ~ne of the nearby 

wards and there lay down to sleep. Everyone slept. And there 

was no one with whom he could speak even one word. And I 

went off to sleep myself. 

And I was wakened in the morning by running about and 

tramping in the corridor; the orderlies were carrying -Kornfeld's 

body to the operating room. He had been dealt eight blows on 

the skull with a plasterer's mallet -while hestiIl- slept. (In our 

camp it was the custom to kill immediately after rising time, 

when the barracks were all unlocked and open and when no. 

9ne yet had got up, whe~ no one was stirring.) And he died 

on the operating table, without regaining consciousness; 

And so it happened -that Kornfeld's prophetic words were his 

last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as 

an inheritance. You cannot brush -off that kind of inheritance 

by shrugging yo~r shoulderS. . 

But by that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts. 

I would have been inclined to endow his ,Words with the significance 

of a universal law of life. H~wever, one can get all 

tangled up that way. One would have to admit that on that basis 

those who had been punished even more cruelly than with prison 

-those 'shot, burned at the stake---were some sort of superevildoers. 

(And yet . . . the innocent are those who get punished 

most zealously of all.) And what woUld one then have 

to say about our so evident torturers: Why dc;>es not fate punish 

them? Why do they prosper? . 

(And the only solution to this would be that the meaning 

of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, 

in prospering, but ... in the development of the soul. From that 

point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of. 

all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward 

from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted 

on those whose development ... holds out hope.) 

But there was something in Kornfeld's last words that touched 

a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. 

And many will accept the same for themselves. 

__ 

614 I THE GU'.LAG ARCHIPELAGO 

In the seventh year of my imprisonment I bad gone over. and 

re-examined my life quite enough and had come to unc;lerstand 

why everything had happened to me: both prison and, as an 

additional piece of ballast, my malignant tumor. And I would 

not have murmured even if·!ill that puniShment had been· considered 

inadequate. _ - 

Punishment? But ... whose? 

Well, just think about that-whose? 

I lay there a long time in that recovery room from which 

K;ornfeld had gone ,forth to his death, and all alone during 

selpel~ nights I pondered -with astonishment my own life and 

the turns it had taken. In accordance-with my established camp 

custom I set down my thoughts in rhymed verses-so as to 

remember them. And the most accurate thing is to cite them 

here-just as they came from the pillow of a hospital- patient, 

when the hard-labor camp was still shuddering . outside the 

windows in the wake of a revolt. 

When was it that I completely 

Scattered the- good seeds, one and all? 

For after all I spent my boyhood 

In the bright singing of Thy temples. 

Bookish subtleties sparkled brightly, 

Piercing my !UTOgant brain, 

The secrets of the world were. ; . in my grasp, 

Life's destiny ..• as pliable as wax. 

Blood seethed...:...and every swirl 

Gleamed· iridescently before me, 

Without a rumble the building of my faith 

Quietly crumbl~d within my heart. 

, 

But passing here between being and nothingness, 

Stumbling and-clutching at the edge, 

I look behind. me with a grateful tremor 

Upon the life that I have lived. 

Not with good judgment nor with desire 

Are its- twists and turns illumined. 

But with the even glow of the Higher Meaning 

Which became apparent to me only late~ on.

And now with measuring cup returned to me, 

Scooping up the living water, 

God of the Universe! I believe again! 

Though I renounced You, You were with me! 

The A.scent I 615 

Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had 

not understood either myself or my s~ivings. What had seemed 

for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be 

fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to 

that which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of 

the sea knock the inexperienced swinurler off his feet and keep 

g~sot him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully. tossed 

back on dry land by the. blows of misfortune. And it was only 

because of this that I was able to travel the path which I hl!d 

always really ·wanted to travel. .. 

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on 

my bent back, which nearly b'toke beneath its ,load, this essential 

experience: how a huml!ll being becomes evil and how good. 

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be 

infallible, and I was therefore crueI.In the surfeit of power I 

was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments 

I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied 

with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there 

on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first 

stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line 

separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between 

classes, nor between political parties either-but right 

through every human heart~d through all human hearts. 

This line shifts; Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even 

within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of 

good is retamed. And even' in th~ best of all hearts, there remains 

. . . an unuprooted small comer of, evil. 

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the' 

religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a 

human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to 

expel evil fro~ the world in its entirety, but it is possible to 

constrict it within each person. 

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood 

of all .the revolutions in history': They destroy only those 

carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fan, out 'of 

616- I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

r .. 

haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they 

then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, 

magnified still more. 

The Nuremberg Trials have to be regarded as one of the 

special achievements of the twentieth centl,lry: they killed the 

very idea of evil, though they killed very. few of the people who 

had been infected with it. (Of course, Stalin deserves no credit 

here. He ~uld have preferred to explain less and shoot more.) 

d~ if by the twenty-first century humanity has not yet blown 

itself up and h8s not suffocated itself-perhaps it is this direction 

that will triumph? . 

. Yes, and if it does not triumph-then all humanity's history 

will have turned out to be an empty exercise in marking time, 

without the tiniest mite of meaning! Whither and to what end 

will we otherwise be moving? To beat the enemy over the head 

with a club--even cavemen knew that. 

''Know thyself!" There is nothing that so aids -and assists the 

awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about 

one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult 

cycles of such ponderings' over many years, whenever I mentioned 

the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the 

cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain's 

shoulder boards anl,l the forWard march of my battery through 

East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: "So were we any 

better?" 

When people express vexation, in my presence, over the 

West's tendency to crumble, its political shortsightednesS, its 

divisiveness, its conftiSion-I recall too: "Were we, before passing 

through the Archipelago, more steadfast? Firmer in our 

thoughts?" 

_ 

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment 

and say, sometimes to the astonishment of tl\ose about me: 

"Bles.! you, prison!" . 

Lev Tolstoi was right when he dreamed of being pu! in prison. 

At a certain moment that giant began to dry up. He actually 

needed prison as a drought needs a shower of rain! 

All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves 

serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy 

for prisoners and to curse prison. I . . . have served enough


time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: 

"Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!" 

(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is very well for 

you to say that-when you came out of it alive!) 

,.-- 

Chapter 2··· 

• 

0, Corruption? 

/ 

But I have been brought up short: You are nonaIking about 

the subject at all! You have got off the trilckagain-onto prison! 

And what you are supposed to be talking about is camp. 

But I was alsO, I thought, talking about camp. W~l, all right, 

I'll shut up. I shall give some space to contrary opinions. Many 

camp inmates will object to what I have said and will say that 

they did not observe any "ascent" of the soul, that this is nonsense, 

and that corruption took place at every step. 

More insistent and more significant than others (because he 

had already written about all this) was ShaIamov's objection: 

In the camp situation human beings never remain human beings- 

the camps were created to this end 

All human emotions-love, friendship, envy, love of one's fellows, 

mercy, thirst for fame, honesty-fell away from us along with the 

meat of our muscles ••• ; We·had no pride, no vanity, and even jeal-: 

ousy and passion seemed to be Martian concepts .•.. The only thing 

left was anger-the most. enduring of human emotions. 

We came to understand that truth and falsehood were kin sisters. 

Friendship is born neither of need nor of misfortune. If friendship 

. does arise between human beings-it means ~at conditions are not 

that difficult. If misfortune and need have joined' hands-it means 

they were not in extremis. Grief is insufficiently sharp-and deep if it 

can be shared with friends. 

618 

There is only one distinction here to which Shalamov agrees:

Or Corruption? I 619 

Ascent, growth in profundity, the development of human beings, 

is possible in prison. But 

' ... camp-is wholly and consistently a negative school of life. There 

is nothing either necessary or useful that anyone derives from it. The 

prisonerleams flattery, falsehood, and petty and large--scale meanness. 

. . . When he returns home, he sees not only that he has not 

grown dUring his time in camp, but that his interests have become. 

meager and crude.1 '. . 

Y. Ginzburg also agrees with this distinction: "Prison ennobled 

people, while camp corrupted them." 

And how can one object to that? 

. In prison, both ·.in solitary confinement and' outside solitary 

too, a hJJinan being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is . 

a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, -to 

familiarize himself with it, to digest it, and it him. This is the 

highest form of moral effort, which has 'always ennobled every 

human being. 2 A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral 

work and a path upward (if you can cliinb it). If you share those 

years with a comrade, it is nev~ in a situation in which you are 

called on to die in order to save his life, nor is it necessary for 

him to die in order for you to survive. You have the possibility 

of entering not into conflict but into mutual support and enrichment.· 

But in camp, it would appear, you do not have that path. 

Bread is not issued in equal pieces, but thrown onto a pile-go 

grab! Knock down your neighbors, and tear it out of their 

hands! The quantity of bread issued is such that one or two 

people have to die for each who survives. The bread is hung "high 

up on a pine tree-go fell it. The bread is deposited in a coal 

mme-go down and mme it. Can you think about your own 

1. Shalamov also considers it an indication of the human being's oppression 

and corruption in camp that he "lives there for 'long years. subject to someone 

else's will, to someone else's mind." But this is something I have chosen to .set 

aside in a footnote-because, in the first place, one can say just th: same thing 

about many free people (not counting the scOpe for activity in minor details 

which prisoners have as well), and because, in.the. second place. the fatalistic 

character obligatorily instiJled into the native of the Archipelago by his igno .... 

ance of his fate and his inability to in1Iuence it teqds rather tQ ennoble him. to 

free him from fruitless bustle. 

2. -How interesting people become in prison! I have known people who.. became 

tiresome bores after their release, yet in prison you simply' couldn't tear 

yourself away from conversations with them. 

620 I THE GULAG ARC~IP E LAGO 

grief, about the. past and the future, about humanity and God? 

Your mind is absorbed in vain calculations which for the present 

moment cut you off from the heavens-and tomorrow are worth 

nothing. You hate labor-it is your principal enemy. You hate 

your companions-rivals in life and death.a. You are reduced to 

a frazzle by intense envy and alarm lest somewhere behind your 

back others are right now dividing up that bread which could be 

yours, that somewhere on the other side of the wall a tiny potato 

. is being ladled out of the pot which could have ended up in your 

own bowl. 

Camp life was organized in such a way that envy pecked at 

your soul from all sides, even the best-defended soul. Envy also 

extended to terms and to release itself. In 1945 we, the 58's, had 

to see the nonpolitical offenders off at the gates (as a result of 

Stalin's amnesty). What were our feelings toward them? Gladness 

for them because they were going home? No, it was envy because 

it was unjust to free them and to hold us. And V. Vlasov, who 

got a twenty-year term, served out his first ten years calmly, for 

w1!-o was not serving oilt ten years? But in 01947-1948 they 

began to release many others-and he envied them, got nervous, 

and was eating his heart out: How was it that he had received 

. a· sentence of twenty? How galling it was to have to serve that 

second tenner! (And 1 did not ask him, but 1 suppose that when 

these others began to return to camp as repeaters, he then must 

have calmed down.) And in 1955-1956 the 58's were obeing 

released on a mass scale, and the nonpolitical offenders were left 

in the camps. What did they feel at that pomt? A sense of justice 

because the long-suffering article, after forty years of incessant 

persecutions, had at long last been pardoned? No, in fact, there 

was universal envy (I received many letters of this sort in 1963): 

they had freed "the enemies who were far worse than us habitual 

criminals." And why then are we still here? For what? 

And in addition you are constantly gripped by fear: of slipping 

off even that pitifully low level to which you are clinging, of 

losing your work which is still not the hardest, of coming a cropper 

on a prisoner transport, of ending up in a Strict Regimen 

Camp. And on top of that, you got beaten if you were weaker 

3. P. Yakubovich declared: "Nearly every hard-labor convict dislikes every 

other one." Yet where he was there was no competition for survival.


than all the rest, or else you yourseH beat up those weaker than 

you. And wasn't this' corruption? Soul mange is what A. Rubailo, 

an old camp veteran, called this swift decay under external 

pressure. 

Amid these vicious feelings and tense petty calcUlations, when 

and on what foundation could you ascend? 

Chekhov, even before our Corrective Labor


sion" any further than thaJ: The zeks were conducting interrogations 

of themselves. They were' recruiting' stool pigeons to 

denounce themselves. 

Yes, yes. But I am not going to exatWn~ those countless cases 

of corruption here; They are well known to everyone. They have 

already been described, and they will be described again. It is 

quite enough to admit they took place. This is the general trend, 

this is as it should be. 

Why repel:\t about each and every house that in subzero 

weather it loses its warmth? It is much more surprising to note 

that there arehouses..which retain their warmth even in subzero 

weather. 

Shalamov says: .Everyone imprisoned in camp was spiritually 

impoverished. But whenever I recall or encounter a former zek. 

I find areal personality. 

Elsewhere Shalamov himself writes that he wouldn't betray 

other zeks! He·wouldn't become a brigadier and compel others 

to work. 

Why is. that, Varlam TikhQnovich? Why is it that out of a 

clear sky it appears that you would refuse to become either II. 

stoolie ora brigadier-if it is the case that no one in camp can 

avoid or sidestep that slippery slope. of corruption'! Given the 

fact that p-uth and falsehood . . . are kin sisters? Does it mean 

that you did nonetheless grasp at some branch sticking out? Does 

it mean that you found a footing on some stone-and did not 

slide down any further? And maybe, despite everything, anger 

. is not really the 'most long-lived feeling there is? Do you not 

refute your own concept with your character and verses']4 

And how is it that genuine religious believers survived in camp 

(as we mentioned more than once)? In the course of this book we 

nave already mentioned their self-confident procession through 

the ArcHipelag~. sort of silent religious procession with invisible 

candles. How some among them were mowed down by 

machine guns and those next in line continued their march. A 

steadfastness unhearo of in the twentieth century! And it. was 

4. Alas. he decided not to refute it. • . . As if out of stubbornness. he. continued 

this argument .••• On February 23. 1972. in the Llteraturnaya GaUla. 

he published a renunciation (for some reason now that all the threats have 

passed): "The problematics of .the Kolyma Stories have long. since been 

crossed out by life." This renunciation was printed in a black mourning frame. 

and'thus all of us understood that Shalamov had died. (Footnote of 1972.) 

624 I THE GULAG ARCHIPB,LAGO' 

not in the least for show, and thero weren't any declamations. 

:rake some Aunt Dusya Chmil, a round-faced, calm, and quite 

illiterate old woman. The convoy g~ards called out to her: 

"Chmil! What is your article?" 

And she gently, good-naturedly replied: "Why are you asking; 

my boy? It's all written down there. I can't remember them all." 

(She had a bouquet of sections under Article 58.) 

"Your term!" 

Auntie Dusya sighed. She wasn't giving such contradictory 

answers in order to annoy the convoy. In her own simplehearted 

way she pondered this question: Her term? Did they really think 

it was given to human beings to know their terms? , 

''What term! . . . Till God forgives my sins-till then I'll be 

serving time." 

"You are a silly, you! A silly!" The convoy guards laughed. 

"Fifteen years you've got, and you'll serve them all, and maybe 

some more besides." 

But after two and a half years of her term had passed, even 

though she had sent no petitions-all of a sudden a piece of paper 

came: release! ' ' ' 

How could one not envy those people? Were circumstances 

more favorable for them? By no means! It is a well-known fact 

that the "nuns" were kept only with prostitutes and thieves at 

penalty camps. And yet who, was there among the religious 

believers whose soul was corrupted? They died-most certainly, 

, but ... they were not corrupted. , 

And how can one explain that certain unstable people found 

faith right there in camp, that they were strengthened by it, and 

that they survived unc~upted? 

And many. more, scattered' about and unnoticed, came tg 

their allotted turning point and made no mistake in their choice. 

Those who managed to see that things were not onll bad for 

them, but even worse, even harder, for their neighbors. 

And all those who, under the threat of a penalty zone and a 

new term of imprisonment, refused to become stoolies? ' 

How, in general, can one explain Grigory Ivanovich 

Grigoryev, a soil scientist? A scientist' who volunteered for the 

People's Volunteer Corps in 1941-and the rest of the story is a 

familiar one. Taken prisoner near Vyazma, he spent his whole 

captivity in a German camp. And 'the subsequent story is also


familiar. When he returned, he was arrested by us and given a 

tenner. 1 came to know him in winter, engaged in general work 

in Ekibastuz. His forthrightness gleamed from his big quiet eyes, 

some sort of unwavering forthrightness. This man was never able 

to bow in spirit. And he didn't bow in camp either, even though 

he'worked only two of his ten years in' his own field of specialization, 

and didn't receive food parcels from home for nearly the 

whole term. He was subjected on all sides to the camp philosophy; 

to the. camp corruption of soul, but he was incapable of adopting 

it. In the Kemerovo camps (Antibess) the security chief kept 

trying to recruit him as a stoolie. Grigoryev replied to him quite 

honestly and candidly: "I find it quite repulsive to talk to you. 

You will find many willing without me." "You bastard, you'll 

crawl on all fours." "I would be better off hanging myself on the 

first branch.". And so he w~s sent off to a penalty. situation. He 

stood it for half a year. And he made mistakes which were even 

more unforgivable: When he was sent on an agricultural work 

party, he refused (as a soil scientist) to accept the post of brigadier 

offered him. He hoed and scythed with enthusiasm. And even 

more stupidly: in Ekibastuz at the stone quarry he refused to be a 

work checker--only because he would have had to pad the work 

sheets for the sloge~s, for which, later on, when they caught . 

up with it, the eternally drunk free foreman would have to pay 

the penalty. (But would he?) And so he went to break rocks! 

His honesty was so monstrously unnatural that when he went out 

to process potatoes with the vegetable storeroom brigade, he did 

not steal any, though everyone else did. When he was in a good 

post, in the privileged repair-shOp brigade at the pumping-station 

equipment, he left simply because he refused to wash the socks 

of the free bachelor construction supervisor, Treivish. (His fellow 

brigade members tried to persuade him: Come on now, isn't it 

all the same, the kind of work you do? But no, it turned out it 

was not at all the same to him!) How many times did he select 

the worst and hardest lot, just s.o as not to have to offend against 

conscience-and he didn't, not in the least, and 1 am a witness .. 

And even more: because of the astounding influence on his body 

of his bright and spotless human spirit (though no one today 

believes in any such influence, no one understands it) the 

organism of Grigory Ivanovich, who was no longer young (close 

to fifty), grew stronger in camp; his earlier rheumatism of the 


joints disappeared completely, and he became particularly healthy 

after the typhus from which he recovered: in winter he went out 

in cotton sacks, making hole,s -in them for his head lUld his 

arms-and he did- not catch cold! 

So -wouldn't it be more correct to say that no camp can corrupt 

those who have a stable'nucleus, who do not accept that 

pitiful ideology which holds that "hum~n beings are created for 

happiness," an ideology which is done in by the first blow of 

the work assigner's cudgel? 

Those people became corrupted in camp who before camp 

had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual 

upbringing. (This is not at all a theoretical matter-since during 

our glorious half-century millions of them grew up.) 

Those people became corrupted in camp who had already been 

corrupted out in freedom or who were ready for it. Because 

people are corrupted in freedom too, sometimes even more effectively 

than in camp. 

The convoy officer who ordered that Moiseyevaite be tied to 

a post in order to be mocked-had he not been corrupted more 

profoundly than the camp -inmates who spat on her? 

And for that matter did every one of the brigade members 

spit on her? Perhaps only two from each brigade di~ In fact, 

that is probably what happened. 

Tatyana Falike writes: "Observation of people convinced me 

that no man gould become a scoundrel in camp if he had not 

been one before." . 

If a person went swiftly bad in camp, what it might meim was 

that he had not just gone bad, but that that inner foulness which 

had not previously been needed had disclosed itself. 

M. A. Voichenko has his opinion: "In camp, existence did 

not determine- consciousness, but just the opposite: consciousness 

and steadfast faith in the human essence decided whether 

you became an animal or remained a humap. being." 

A drastic, sweeping declaration! . . . But he was not the only 

one who thought so. The artist Ivashev-Musatov passionately 

argued exactly the same thing. 

Yes, camp corruption was a mass phenomenon. But not only 

because the camps were awful, but because in addition we ,., 

Soviet people stepped upon the soil of the Archipelago spiritually 

disarmed-long since prepared to be corrupted, already tinged


by it out in freedom, and we strained our ears to hear from the 

old camp veterans "how to live in camp." 

But we ought to have known how to live (and how to die) 

without any camp. 

And perhaps, Variam Tikhonovich Shalamov, as a general 

rule friendship between people does arise in need and misfortune, 

even in extreme misfortune' too-but not between such 

withered and nasty people. as we were, given our decades of 

upbringing? . 

H corruption was so inevitable, then why did Olga Lvovna 

Sliozberg not abandon her freezing friend on the forest trail, but - 

stay behind for nearly certain death together with her-and 

save her? Wasn't that an extreme of misfortune? 

And if corruption was so inevitable, then where did Vasily 

Mefodyevich Yakovenko spring from? He servCd out two terms, 

had only just been released, was living as a free employee 'in 

Vorkuta, and was' just beginning to crawl around without an 

escort and acquire his first tiny nest. It was 1949. In Vorkuta 

they began to rearrest former zeks and give them new sentences. 

An arrest psychosis! There was'panic among the free employees! 

How could they hold on to their freedom? How could they be 

less noticeable? But Y. D. Grodzensky, a friend of Yakovenko 

from the same Vorkuta camp, was arrested . .During the interrogation 

he was lQsing strength and was close to death. There was 

no one to bring him food parcels. And Yakovenko fearlessly 

brought him food parcels! If you want to, you dogs, rake me in 

tool 

Why was this inan not corrupted! 

And do not all those who survived remember one or another' 

person who reached out a hand to him in camp and saved him 

at a difficult moment? 

Yes, the camps were calculated and intended to corrupt. But 

this didn't mean that they succeeded in crushing everyone. 

Just as in nature the process of oxidation never occurs without 

an acompan~ng reduction (one substance oxidizes while at the 

same time another reduces), so in camp, too (and everywhere 

in life), there is no corruption without aScent. They exist alongside 

one another.· 

In the next part I hope still to show how in other camps, in 

the· Special Camps, a different environment was created after a 


certain time: the process of corruption was greatly hampered and 

the process of ascent became attractive even to the camp 

careerists • 

• 

Well, and what about correction? How did things go. with 

correction, after all? ("Correction" is a social and state concept 

and does not coincide with ascent.) All the systems of justice in 

the world, not just our own, dream that criminals will not merely 

serve out their term but will also become ~orected in the process, 

in other words behave so as not to return to the defendant's bench 

in court, particularly fpr the same offense.s . 

. Dostoyevskyexclaims: "Whom did hard labor ever correct?" 

The ideal of correction existed in -Russian legislation after the 

great reform. (The whole of Chekhov's Sakhalin grew out of 

. that ideal.) But was it ever successfully implemented? 

P. Yakubovich thought about this a gteat deal and wrote: 

The terrorist regimen of hard labor "corrects" only those who 

have not become depraved-but they would not commit a second 

crime even without it. Yet this regimen only depraves a corrupt 

person, compelling him to be sly and hypocritical, and to do his 

. utmost not to leave any clues behind. 

What can one say about our Corrective Labor Camps? 

Students of penology (Gefiingniskunde) always believed that a 

prisoner must not be driven to total despair, that he must always 

be left hope and a way out. The reader has already seen that our 

Corrective Labor Camps drove prisoners only and precisely to 

total despair. . 

Chekhov spoke truly: "Soul-searching-that is what's truly 

needed for correctiOIi." But it was soul-searching that the managers 

of our camps feared most of all. The common barracks, 

brigades, work collectives, were all specially designed to disperse 

and dismember that dangerous soul-searching. 

t~hW sort of correction could there be in our camps! All they 

could do was damage: instill the thieves' morality, instill the 

5. Nonetheless, they never strove to "correct" the 58's--in other· words to 

avoid imprisoning them a second time. We have already cited the fr!Ulk statements 

of the I!enologists on this subject. They wanted to exterminate the 58's 

through labor. And the fact that we survived was due to .... our own initiative.

,Or Corruption? I 629 

cruel camp ways as the general law of life. ("Criminogenic 

places" in the penologists' language-in other words, crime 

schools.) , 

I. G. Pisarev, when he was completing his lengthy prison 

sentence, wrote, in 1963: "It becomes particularly hard, because 

you leave here an incurable nervous wreck, with your health 

irreparably ruined by, lack of proper food and by incessant incitement. 

Here people are corrupted once and for all. Maybe 

butter woulsln't have melted in a man's mouth before-but now 

you'd never manage to put salt on his tail. If you say 'pig' to a 

person for seven years, he will end up by grunting. . . . It is 

only the first year that punishes the prisoner; all the rest simply 

embitter him. He adapts to the conditions, and that is all. The 

law, with its long sentences and its cruelty, punishes the criminal's 

family more than it does him." . 

Here is another letter. "It is painful and frightening to leave 

life without having seen anything and without having done anything, 

and no one even cares about you except, in all likelihood, 

your mother, who never ceases to wait for you her whole life 

long." 

And here is what Aleksandr Kuzmich K., who devoted much 

thought to the matter, wrote in 1963: 

They commuted my sentence of execution'to twenty years of hard 

labor;but, to be quite honest, I don't consider that to have been any 

favor to me .... I experienced those "mistakes," as it is now the 

style to call them, on my own skin and bones-and they were in no 

way any easier ,or better than those of Auschwitz or Majdanek. How 

is 'one supposed to distinguish dirt from truth? A murderer from an 

instructor? The law1'rom lawlessness? An executioner from a patriot 

-when he moves upward, and from being a lieutenant becomes a 

lieutenant colonel, and the cockade he wears on his hat is very much 

like the one worn before 1917? . . . And how am I, emerging after 

eighteen years of imprisonment, supposed to decipher all the obfuscations? 

... I envy you educated people ,who have f1exibl~ minds 

and who do not have to spend a long time breaking your heads in 

order to figure out how you should proceed or how you should adapt, 

which in fact I do not want to do. 

Well spoken indeed! "I do not want." With feelings like that 

0)1 his release, can one say that he was corrupted? But was he 

then corrected in the state's sense? Of course not. For the state 


he has simply been ruined. See what he has come to understand: 

This was no different from Auschwitz, and the cockades are no 

different either. 

The "correction" which the state would like (?) is by and 

large never attained in the camps. The "graduates" of the camp 

learn only to be two-faced, how to pretend to be corrected, and 

they learn cynicism-toward the appeals of the state, the laws 

of the state, and its promises. 

And what if there is nothing for a person to be .corrected of? 

If he is not a criminal at all in the first place? If he has been 

imprisoned because he prayed "to God, or expressed an independent 

opinion, or became a prisoner of war, or because of his 

father, or simply to fulfill the prisoner-arrest quota-what then 

could the camps give him? . 

The Sakhalin prison inspector said to Chekhov:"If, in the 

final analysis, out of a hundred hard-labor prisoners fifteen to 

twenty emerge as decent men, the responsibility for this result 

lies not so much with the corrective measures we employ as with 

our Russian courts, which send so many good relIable elements 

to hard labor." 

Well, that judgment can stand for the Archipelago too, provided 

we increase the proportion of the innocently sentenced to, 

say, 80 percent, without at the same time forgetting that in our 

camps the percentage of spoilage was also considerably higher. 

If we are speaking not about the meat grinder for unwanted 

millions, not· about the cesspool into which they were hurled 

without pity for the people-but about a serious correctional 

system-the most complex of questions arises: How is it possible' 

to give monotonously uniform punishments on the basis of a 

single, unified criminal code? After all, e)!:ternally equal punishments 

for different individuals, some more moral and others more 

corrupted, some more sensitive and some more crude, some 

educated and some uneducated, are completely unequal punishments. 

(See Dostoyevsky in many' different places -in his The 

House of the Dead.) . 

English thought has understood this, and they say there (1 

don't)mow how much they practice it) that the punishment must 

fit not Dnly the crime but also the character of each criminal. 

For example, the general loss of external freedom for a person


with a rich inner world is less hard to bear than for a: person w~o 

is immature, who lives more in terms of the flesh. This second 

person "requires more in terms of external impressions, and his 

instincts pull him more strongly in the direction of· freedom." 

(Yakubovich.) The first finds it easier to be in solitary Confinement, 

especially with books. (Ab, how some of us thirsted for 

that kind of imprisonment, instead of camp! When the body is 

confined, what broad horizons are opened to the mind and the 

soul! Nikolai Morozov did not seem in 'any way remarkable 

either before his arrest or, which is the more surprising, after it. 

But prison meditation provided him with the chance to conceive 

of the planetary structure of the atom-with its differentially 

charged nucleus and electrons-ten years before Rutherford! 

But we were never offered pencils, paper, and books, and ·even 

had every last one of them taken away from us.) The second 

kind of prisoner, on tlle other hand, might not be able to stand 

solitary confinement for. even a year, and would simply wither 

away and die off. He would need someone, companions! And 

yet for the former kind of prisoner unpleasaJit company could 

be worse than no one. But camp (where they gave very little 

food) would be much easier for the latter to bear than for the 

former. As would a barracks where four· hundred people were 

housed, all of· them shouting, playing the fool, playing cards and 

dominoes, howling and snoring, and where, on top of all that, 

the radio, which was aimed at idiots, was constantly screeching 

away. (The camps in which I served time were punished by 

having no ractio! What a salvation that was!) 

Thus the system of Corrective Labor Camps in p~cular, 

with their obligatory and exhausting physical labor and their 

obligatory participation in the humiliating, buzzing ant heap, 

was a more effective means of destroying the intelligentsia than 

was prison. It was precisely the intelligentsia that this system 

killed off quickly and completely. 

\ 

Chapter 3 

" 

• 

Our Muzzled Freedom 

But even when all the main things about the Gulag Archipelago 

are written, read, and. understood, will there be anyone 

even then who grasps what our freedom was like? What sort of 

a country it was that for whole decades dragged that Archipelago 

about inside itself? 

It was my fate to carry inSide me a tumor the size of a large 

man's fist. This tumor. swelled and distorted my stomach, 

hindered my eating and sleeping, and I was always conscious of 

it (though it did not constitute even one-half of one percent of 

my body, whereas within the country as a whole the Archipelago 

constituted 8 percent). But the horrifying thing was not that this 

tumor pressed upon and displaced adjacent organs. What was 

most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected 

the whole body. 

And in this same way our whole country. was infected by the 

poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to 

get rid of them someday, only God knows. 

Can we, dare we, describe the full loathsomeness of the state 

in which we lived (not so remote from that of today)? And if 

we do not show that loathsomeness in its entirety, then we at once 

have a lie. :for this reason I consider that literature did not exist 

in our country in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Because without 

the full truth it is not literature. And today they show this loathsomeness 

according to the fashion of the moment-by inference, 

an inserted phrase, an afterthought, or hint-and the result is 

again a lie. 

This is not the task of our book, but let us try to enumerate 

632

Our Muzzled Freedom I 633 

briefly those traits of free life. which were determined by the 

closeness of the Archipelago or which were in the same style. 

1. Constant Fear. As the reader has already seen, the roster 

of the waves of recruitment into the Archipelago is not exhausted 

with 1935, or 1937, or 1949. The recruitment went on all the 

time. Just as there is no minute when people are not dying or 

being born, so there was nOl.minute when people were not being 

arrested . .sometimes this came close to a person, sometimes it 

was further off; sometimes a person deceived himself into thinking_ 

that nothing threatened him, and sometimes he himself became 

an executioner, and thus the threat to him diminished. Bllt 

any adUlt inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up 

to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take 

only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably 

into the abyss .. 

Just as in the Archipelago beneath every trusty lay the chasm 

(and death) of general work, so beneath every inhabitant lay 

the chasm (and death) of the Archipelago. In appearance the 

country was much bigger than its Archipelago, but all of it and 

all its inhabitants hung phantomlike above the latter's gaping 

maw. 

Fear was not always the fear of arrest. There were intermediate 

threats: purges, inspections, the completion of security 

questionnaires-routine or extraordinary ones-dismissal from 

work, deprivation of residence permit, expulsion or exile. 1 The 

security questionnaires were so detailed and so inquisitive that 

more than half the inhabitants of the country had a bad conscience 

and were constantly and permanently tormented by the 

approach of the period when they had to be filled out. Once 

people had invented a false life story for these questionnaires, 

they had to try not to get tangled up in it. But danger might 

strike suddenly: The son of the Kady Vlasov, Igor, regularly 

entered in his questionnaire the statement that his father was 

dead. And that way he got into a military school. Then one fine 

day he was summoned and he had three days to present a certificate 

of hjs father's death. And he had to do it! 

1. In addition, there were such little-known forms as expulsion from the 

Party, dismissal.from work, and dispatch to a camp as a free worker. That is 

how Stepan Grigoryevich Onchul was exiled in 1938. It was natural that such 

persons were listed as being \(ery unreliable. During the war Onchul was conscripted 

into a work battalion, where he died. 

634 I THB GULAGARCHIPBLAGO 

. The aggregate 'fear led toa correct consciousness of one's own 

insignificance and-Of the lack of any kind of rights. In November, 

1938, Natasha Anichkova learned that the person she loved (her 

common-law husband) had been arrested in Orel. She went 

theJ;e. The enormous square in front of the prison was filled with 

carts .. On them sat women in bast sandals, wearing their traditional 

peasant dress, with parcels which the authorities refused 

to accept. Anichkova pushed her way up to a window in a dreadful 

prison wall. "Who are you?" they asked her sternly. They 

heard her out. "Well, now, listen here, Comrade Muscovite, I 

am going to give you one piece of advice: get out of here today, 

because at night they are going to come for you toq." The 

foreigner finds all this quite incomprehensible: Why had the 

Chekist given her unsolicited advice instead of a businesslike 

answer to her qUeStion? What right did he have to demand of a 

free citizen that she leave immediately? And who was going 

to come and why? But what Soviet citizen will lie and say that 

this is incomprehensible to him or that it sounds like an improbable 

case? After advice like that you would be afraid to 

stay in a strange city! 

Nadezhda Mandelstam* speaks truly when she remarks that 

our life is so permeated with prison that simple meaningful 

words like "they took," or "they put inside," or "he is inside," or 

"they let out," are understood by everyone in our country in only 

one sense, even without a context. 

Peace of mind is something our citizens have never known. 

2. Servitude. If it had been easy to change 'your place of 

residence, to leave a place that had become dangerous for you 

and thus shake off fear and refresh yourself, people would have 

behaved more boldly, and they right have taken some risks. But 

for long decades we were shackled by that same system under 

which no worker could quit work of his own accord. And the 

passport regulations also fastened everyone to particular places. 

And the housing, which could not be sold, nor exchanged, nor 

'rented. And because of this it was an insane piece of daring to 

protest in the place where you lived or worked. .~ ~ 

3.· Secrecy and Mistrust. These feelings .replaced our former 

openhearted cordiality and hospitality (which had still not been


destroyed in the ·twenties). These feelings were the natural defense 

of. any family· and every person, particularly because no 

one could ever quit work or leave, and every little detail was 

kept in sight and within earshot for years. The secretiveness of 

the Soviet person is by no means superfluous, but is absolutely 

necessary, even though to a foreigner it may at times seem superhuman. 

The former Tsarist officer K.U. survived and was never 

arrested only because when he got married he did not tell his 

wife about his past. His brother, N.U., was arrested-and the 

wife of the arrested man, taking advantage of the fact that they 

lived in different cities at the time of his arrest, hid his arrest 

from her own father and mother-so they would not blurt it 

out. She preferred telling them and everyone else that her husband 

had abandoned her, and then playing that role a long time! 

Now these were the secrets of one family which I was told thirty 

years later. And what urban family did not have such secrets? 

. In 1949 the father of a girl who was a fellow student of V.L's 

was arrested. In these cases everyone would shun such a student, 

and that was considered natural. But V.L did. not shun·her, and 

openly expressed sympathy with the girl, and tried to . find ways 

to help her out. Frightened by such unusual conduct, the girl 

rejected V J.'s help and participation, and lied to him, saying she 

did not believe in the innocence of her arrested father, and that 

he had evidently. concealed his crime from his family all his life. 

(And it was only during the times of Khrushchev that their 

tongues were loosened: the girl told him she had decided he was 

either a police informer or else a member of an· anti-Soviet 

organization out to rope in the dissatisfied.) 

This universal mutual mistrust had the effect of deepening 

the mass-grave pit of slavery. The moment someone began to 

,-speak up frankly, everyone stepped back and shunned him: "A 

provocation!" And therefore anyone who burst out with a sincere 

protest was predestined to loneliness and alienation. 

4. Universal Ignorance. Hiding things from each qAl~, and 

not trusting each other, we ourselves helped imp~JWmt that 

absolute secrecy, absolute misinformation, among us which was 

the cause of causes of everything that took place-:-including both 

the millions of arrests and the inass approval of them also. Informing 

one another of nothing, neither shouting nor groaning, 

636 I THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAG.O 

and learning nothing from one another, we were completely in 

the hands of the newspapers and the official orators. Every day 

they pushed in our faces some new piece of incitement, like a 

photognj.ph of a railroad wreck (sabotage) somewhere three 

thousand miles away. And what we really needed to learn about, 

which was what had happened on our apartment landing that 

day, we had no way of finding out. 

How could you become a citizen, knowing nothing about 

life around you? Only when. you yourself were caught in the 

trap would you find out-too late. 

5. Squealing was developed to a mind-boggling extent. Hundreds 

of thousands of Security officers in their offitlial offices, in 

the innocent rooms of official buildings, and in prearranged 

apartments, sparing neither paper nor. their unoccupied tinIe, 

tirelessly recruited and summoned stool pigeons to give reports, 

and this in such enormous numbers as they could never have 

found necessary for collecting information. They even. recruited 

obvi!)usly useless and unsuitable people who would most certainly 

not· agree to report to them-for example, a religious believer, 

the wife of the Baptist minister Nikitin, who had died in camp. 

Nonetheless, she was kept standing for several hours while being 

questioned, then was arrested, and then transferred to worse 

work ather factory. One of the purposes of such extensive recruitment· 

was, evidently, to make each subject feel the breath 

of the stool pigeons on his own skin. So that in every group of 

people, in every office, in every apartment, either there would be 

an informer or else the people there would be afraid there was. 

I will give my own su~rficial speculative estimate: Out of 

every four to five city dwellers there would most certainly be· 

one who at least once in his life had received a propo~al to become 

an informer. And it might even have been more widespread 

than that. Quite recently I carried out my own spot check, 

both among groups of ex-prisoners and among groups of those 

who· have always been free. I asked which out of the group they 

had tllied to recruit and when and how. And it turned out that 

out Qf several people at a table all had ~ived such proposals 

at OIie tinIe or another! . 

Nadezhda Mandelstam correCtly concludes: Beyond the purpose 

of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose 

as well. Any person who had let himself· be recruited would,


out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested in the 

continuing stability of the regime.· 

Secretiveness spread its cold tentacles throughout the whole 

people. It crept between colleagues at work" between old 

friends, students, soldiers, neighbors, children growing up-and 

even into the reception room of the NKVD, among the prisoners' 

wives bringing food parcels. 

6. Betrayal as a Form of ExistenCe. Given this constant fear 

over a period of many years-for oneself and one's family---,a 

htlJ!lan being became a vassal of fe,ar, subjected to ,it. And it 

turned out that the least dangerous form of existence· was con-, 

stant betrayal. 

The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of 

betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to 

notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn 

away one's face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, 

your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept 

silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (For you could not 

afford to lose your current job!) And then it was announced at 

work, at the' general meeting, that the person who had disappeared 

the day before was . . . an inveterate enemy of the 

people. And you, who had bent your back beside him for tWenty 

years at the same desk, now by your noble silence .< or eVen by 

your condemning speech!), had to show how hostile you were 

to his crimes. (You had to make this sacrifice for the sake of 

your own dear family, for your own dear ones! What right bad 

you not to think.about them?) But the person arrested had left 

behind him I! .~e, a mother, children, and perhaps they at 

least ought ~",;helped? No, no, that would be dangerous: after 

all, these wet:e the wife of an enemy and the mother efan 

enemy, and they were the children of an enemy (and yoUI' own 

children'had a long education ahead of them)! 

When they arrested englIllier Palchinsky, his wife, Nina, 

wrote to Kropotkin's widow: "I have been left without any 

funds, and no one, 'ven me any help, all shun me and fear 

me .... And f· . ':, d out what friends are now. The~e are 

very few exc " ;'v 

And one who concealed an enemy was also an enemy! And 

2. A letter of August 16, 1929, manuscript section of the Lenin Ilbrary, 

collection 410, card file 5, storage unit 24. 


one who abetted an enemy was .also an enemy! And one w~o 

continued his friendship with'an enemy was also an enemy.'-And 

the telephone of the accursed· family fell silent. And they 

stopped getting letters. And on the street people passed them 

without recognizing them, without. offering them a hand to 

shake, without nodding to them: And even less were they invited 

out. And no one offered to lend them money. And in the 

hustle of a big city people felt as if they were in a desert. 

And that was precisely what Stalin n~ded! And he laughed 

in his mustaches, the shoeshine boy! 

Academician Sergei Vavilov, after the repression of his great 

brother, became a lackey president of the Academy of Sciences. 

(That mustached prankster thought it all up too, to make a fool 

of him, and as a test for the human heart.) A. N. Tolstoi, a 

Soviet count, avoided not only visiting but even giving money to 

the family of his arrested brother. Leonid. Leonov forbade his 

own wife, whose maiden name was Sabashnikova, to visit the 

family of her arrested brother, S. M. Sabashnikov. 

And the legendary Georgi Dimitrov, that roaring lion of the 

Leipzig trial, retreated and declined to save and even betrayed 

his friends Popov and Tanev when they, who had been acquitted 

by a Fascist court, got sentenced to fifteen years each on Soviet 

soil "for the attempted assassination of Comrade Dimitrov." 

(And they served time in Kraslag.) 

It is well known what the situation


where the apartment was sealed shut. He went to the neighbors, 

and. to acquaintances, and. to friends of his papa and mlUllaand 

not only did no one take that small boy into their family, 

but they refused even to let him spend the night! And so he went. 

and turned himself in at an orphanage. . . . Contemporaries! 

Fellow citizens! Do you recognize here your own swinish faces? 

But all that was .only the minimal degree 'of betrayal-to tum 

one's back. But how many other alluring degrees there were-: 

and what a multitude' of people descended them! Those who 

fired Kaveshan's mother from work---,did they not also tum 

their backs and make their own contribution? Those who 

harkened to the ring of the Security men and sent Nikitin's wife 

to manual labor, so that she would gi,ve in and become a stoolie 

all the sooner? Yes, and those editors who rushed to cross off the 

name of the writer who had been arrested the day before . 

. Marshal BlUcher-he is a symbol of that epoch: he sat like 

an owl in the presidium of the court and judged Tukhachevsky; 

(And Tukhachevsky would have done the same to him.) They 

shot Tukhachevsky-and then they cut off BlUcher's head too. 

Or what about the famous medical professors Vinogradov and 

Shereshevsky? Today we recall that they themselves were Victims 

of the malevolent slander of 1952-but they themselves signed 

the D9.JesS malevolent slander against their colleagues Pletnev 

and Levin 

Ii_ 

in 1936, (And the Great Laureate kept himself in 

training, both in theme imd in individual souls ....) . 

People in the field of betrayal-and their best powers of 

reasoning were used in justification of it. In 1937 a husband and 

wife were awaiting arrest-because the wife had come from Poland. 

And here is what they agreed' on: Before .the actual arrest 

the husband denounced thll wife to the police! She was arrested, 

and by ~ same token he was "purified" in the eyes of the NKVD 

and sta~e. And in that same glorious year, the prerevolutionary 

~ prisoner Adolf Mezhov, going off to prison, 

proclaimed -tf).his one and only beloved daughter, Izabella: "We 

have devoted our lives to Soviet power, and therefore let no one 

make use of your ~ury. Enter the Komsomol!" Under the 

terms of hissenteru;e. Mezhov was not forbidden correspondence, 

but the Komsomol forbade his daughter to engage in any correspoJI,de,nce. 

And in the spirit of her father's testament the daughter 

~oner her father. 

640 I THE GUI,AG ARCHIPELAGO 

How many of those renunciations there were at that time! 

Some of them made in public, some of them in the press: "I, the 

undersigned, from such and such a date renounce my father. and 

my mother as enemies of the Soviet people." And thus they 

purchased their lives. . 

Those who were not alive during that time, or who do not 

liv.e today in China, will find it nearly impossible to comprehend 

and forgive this. In ordinary human soc~eties the human being 

lives out his sixty years without ever getting caught in the 

pincers of that kind of choice, and he himself is quite convinced 

of his decency, as are those who pronounce speeches over his 

grave. A human' being departs from life without ever having 

learned into what kind of deep well of evil one can fall. 

And the mass mange of souls does not spread through society 

instantly. During all the twenties and the beginning of the 

thirties many in our country still preserved their souls and the 

concepts of the former $ociety: to help in misfortune, to defend 

those in difficulties. And even as late as 1933 Nikolai Vavilov 

and Meister openly petitioned on behalf of all the arrested staff 

members of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Plant 

Breeding. There is a' certain minimal necessary period of corruption 

prior to which the great Apparatus cannot cope with 

the people: This period' is also determined by the age of those 

stubborn people who have not yet grown old. For Russia it to~ 

twenty years. When the Baltic States .suffered mass arrests in 

1949, their corruption had only had five or six years to establish 

itself, and that proved too little, and families thl\,suffered from 

the government,met with support on all sides. ifVes, and tliere 

was a supplementary cause there, strengthening the resistance of 

. the Baltic peoples: social oppression there appeared simply as 

national oppression, and in this case people always fight back 

more firmly.) . 

In evaluating 1937 for the Archipelago, we refused iethe 

title of the crowning ,glory. But here, ·in talking about freedom, 

we have to grant it this C()rroded crown of betrayal; one has to 

admit that .this was the particular year that broke the soul of 

our freedom and opened it wide to corruption on a mass scale. 

Yet even this was not yet the end of our societyf (As we see 

today, the end never did come-the living thread of Russia 

survived, hung on until better times came in 1956, and it is now

Our MuuledFreedom I 641 

less ilian ever likely to die.) The resistance was not overt. It did 

not beautify the epoch of the universal fall, but with its invisible 

warm veins its heart kept on beating, beating, beating, beating. 

And in that awful time, when in apprehensive loneliness 

precious photographs, precious lettel's and diaries, were burned, 

when every yellowed piece of paper i.ri the family cupboard all 

of a sudden gleamed out like a fiery fern of death and could 'not 

jump into the stove faSt eD(~ugh, in that awful time; what great 

heroism was required not' to bum things up night after night for 

sdnas~oht and thousands of nights and to preserve the archives 

of those who had" been sentenced (like Florensky) or of those 

who were well known to be in. disgrace (like the philosopher 

Fyodorov)! And what a blazing, underground, anti-Soviet act 

of rebellion the story of Lidiya Chukovskaya, Sotya Petrovna, oI< 

must have seemed! It was preserved by Isidor Glikin. In blockaded 

Leningrad, feeling the approach of death, he made his way 

through the entire city to carry ino his sister and thus to save it. 

Every act of resistance to the govenunent required heroism 

quite out of proportion to the magnitude of the act. It was safer 

to keep dynamite during the rule of Alexander II than it was to 

shelter the orphan of an enemy of the people under Stalin. Nonetheless, 

how many such children were taken in and saved . . . 

Let the .. ,children themselv~s tell their stories. And secret assistance 

to families ... did occur. And there was someone who took 

e~ place of an ares~.person's.wife who. had been in a hopeless 

Ime for .. three days, ~'fhat she could go In to get warm and get 

some Sleep. And therl was also someone who went oft' with 

pounding heart to warn· someone else that an ambus)1 was 

waiting for him at his apartment. and that he must not retilm 

there. And there was someone 'rho gave a fugitive shelter, even 

though he himself did not sleep that night. 

We have already mentioned those so bold as not to .vote in 

favor of the Promparty executions. And there was also someone 

who went to the Archipelago for defending his unobtrusive, unknown 

colleagues at work. And sons followed in the footsteps 

of their fathers: the son of that Rozhansky,oI< Ivan, himself 

suffered in defense of his colleague Kopelev. At a Party meeting 

of the Leningrad Children's Publishing House, M. M. Maisner 

stood up and began to defend "wreckers in children's literature" 

-and right then and there he was expelled from the Party and 


arrested. And, after all, he knew what he was doing.8 And in 

the wartime censorship office-in R yazan in 19~ I-a girl censor 

tore up the criminal letter of a front-line soldier whom she did 

not know. But she was observed tearing it up and putting it 

into a wastebasket, and they pieced the letter back together- 

_ and arrested her. She sacrificed herself for a distant stranger! 

(And the only reason I heard about this was that it took place 

in Ryazan. And how many such cases were there unknown? .. ) 

Nowadays it is quite convenient to declare that arrest was a 

lottery (Ehrenburg). Yes, it was a lottery all right, but some of 

the numbers were "fixed." They threw out a general dragnet and 

arrested in accordance with assigned quota figures, yes, but 

every person who objected publicly they grabbed that very 

minute! And it turned into a selection on the basis of soul, not a 

lottery! Those who were bOld fell beneath the ax, were sent off 

to the Archipelago--and the picture of the monotonously 

obedient freedom remained unrufHed. All those who were p~er 

and better could not stay in that society;· and without them it 

kept getting more and more trashy. You would not notice these 

quiet departures at all. But they were, in fact, the dying of the 

luo~ of the people. 

7. Corruption. In a situation of fear and betrayal over many 

years people survive unharmed only in a s.uperficial, bodily 

sense. And inside . . . they become corrupt. 

So many Inillions of people agreed to become stool pigeons. 

And, after all, if some forty to fifty Inillion ~ple served long 

sentences in the Archipelago during the course of the thirty-five 

years up to 1953, including those who died=---and this is a modest 

estimate, being only three or four times the population of Gulag 

at anyone time, and, after all, during the war the death rate 

there was running one percent per day-then we can assume 

that at least every third or at least every fifth case was the consequence 

of somebody's denunciation and that somebody was 

willing tQ...Provide evidence as a witness! All of them, all those 

3. There is evidence in our possession of a heroic case of mass steadfastness. 

but I require a second independent confirmation of it: in 1930 several hundred 

cadets of a certain Ukrainian military school arrived on Solovki in their own 

formation (refusing convoy)-because they had refused to suppress peasant 

disturtiinces.


murderers· with ink, are still llJ!long us today. Some of them 

brought about the arrest of their neighbors out of fear-and this 

was only the first step. Others did it for material gain. And still 

others, the youngest at the tirite,. who are now on the threshold 

of a pension, betrayed with inspiration, ou~ of ideological considerations, 

and sometimes even openly; after all, it was con~ 

sidered a service to one's class to expose the enemy! And all 

these people are among us. And most often they are prospering. 

And we still rejoice that they are "our ordinary Soviet people." 

Cancer of the soul develops secretly too _and strikes at.that 

particwar part of it where one expects to· find gratitude. Fyodor 

Peregud gave Misha Ivanov food and drink; Ivanov was out of 

work, and so Peregud got him a job at the Tambov--railroad-car 

repair f!\ctory and taught him the trade. He had no place to live, . 

so he let him move in with him, like a relative. And then Mikhail 

Dmitriyevich Ivanov sent a denunciation to the NKVD accusing 

Fyodor Peregud of praising


pipes of peace. At the Arctic station oh Domashni Island, off 

Severnaya Zemlya, there were just three people: the non-Party 

chief of the station, Aleksandr· Pavlovich Babich, a muchhonored 

old Arctic explorer; the manual laborer Yeryomin, who 

was the only Party member and who was also the Party organizer 

(!) of the station; and the Komsomol member (the Komsomol 

,)!~gro the meteorologist Goryachenko, who was ambitiously 

trying to shove, the chief aside and take his job. 

Goryachenko dug around among the chiefs personal possessions, 

stole documents, and made threats. The Jack London solution 

- would have been for the other two men simply to shove this 

scoundrel down through the ice. But no! Instead, a telegram was 

sent to Papanin in the Northern Sea Route headquarters about the 

necessity' of replacing this employee. The Party organizer Yeryomin 

signed the telegram, but then he confessed to the Komsomol 

member, and together they sent Papanin a Party-Komsomol 

telegram just the opposite in I;ontent. Papatiin's decision 

was: The collective has disintegrated; 'remove them to the mainland. 

They sent the icebreaker Sadko to get them. On board the 

Sadko the Komsomol man, lost no time at all and provided the 

ship's political co,mmissar with materials. Babich was arrested 

on the spot. (The principal accusation was that he intended to 

tum the icebreaker Sadko over to the Germans-that same icebreaker 

on which they were all now sailing! . . .) Once ashore, 

Babich was.immediately put into a Preliminary Detention CeH. 

(Let us imagine for one moment that the ship's commissar was 

an honest amf reasonable person and that he had summoned 

Babich and heard the other side of the question. But this would 

have meant disclosing a secret denunciation to a possible enemy! 

And iJ;! that case Got-"ko, through Papanin, would have 

• also procured the arreSt7'of the ship's commissar. The system 

worked faultlessly!) , 

Of course, among individuals who had not been brought up 

from childhood in the Pioneer detachments and the Komsomol 

cells, there were souls that retained their integrity. At a Siberian 

station a husky soldier, seeing a trainload of prisoners, suddenly 

rushed off to buy several packs of cigarettes and persuaded the 

convoy guards to pass them on to the prisoners. (And in other 

places in this book we describe similar cases,) But this soldier 

was probably not on duty, and was probably on leav~, and he 


did not have the Komsomol organizer of his unit near him. If he 

had been on duty in his own unit, he would not have made up 

his mind to do it because he would have caught hell for it. Yes, 

. and it was possible that even in the other situation the military 

police may have called him to account for it. 

8. The Lie as a Form of Existence. Whether giving in to fear, 

or influenced by material self-interest or envy, people can't nonetheless 

become stupid so swiftly. Their souls may be thoroughly 

muddied, but they still have a sufficiently clear mind. They cannot 

believe that all the genius of the world has suddenly concentrated 

itself in one head with a flattened, low-hanging 

.forehead. They simply cannot believe the stupid and silly images 

of themselves which they hear over the radio, see in films, and 

read in the newspapers. Nothing forces them to speak the truth 

in reply, but no one allows them to keep silent! They have to 

talk! And what else but a lie? They have to applaud madly, and 

no one requires honesty of them. 

And if in Pravda on May 20, 1938, we read the appeal of 

workers in higher education to Comrade Stalin: 

Heightening our revolutionary vigilance, we will help our glorious 

intelligence service, headed by the true Leninist, the Stalinist People's 

Commissar Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, to. purge our higher educational 

institutions as well as all our country of the remnants of the 

Trotskyite-Bukharinite and other counterrevolutionary trash . . . 

we certainly do not conclude that the entire meeting of a thousand 

persons consisted solely of idiots-but merely of degenerate 

liars acceding to their own arrest on the morrow. 

The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of e)!:istence, 

in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be 

overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by 

someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct 

lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common 

lie. There exists a collection of ready-made phrases, of labels, a 

selection of ready-made lies. And not one single speech nor one 

single essay or article nor one single book-be it scientific, 

journalistic, -critical, or "literary," so-called-ean exist without 

the use of these primary cliches. In the most scientific of texts it 

is required that someone's false authority or false priority be


upheld somewhere, and that someone be cursed for telling the 

truth; without this lie even an academic work cannot see the 

light of day. And what can be said about those shrill meetings 

and trashy lunch-break gatherings where you are compelled to 

• vote against your own opinion, to pretend to be glad over what 

distresses you (be it a new state loan, the lowering of piece rates, 

contributions to some tank column, Sunday work duties, or sending 

your children to help on the collective farms) and to express 

the deepest anger in areas about which you couldn't care lesssome 

kind of intangible, invisible violence in the West Indies or 

Paraguay? 

In prison Tenno recalled with shame how two weeks before 

his own arrest he had lectured the sailors on "The Stalinist Constitution-The 

Most Democratic in the World." And of course 

not one word of it was sincere. 

There is no man who has typed even one page . ... without 

lying. There is no man who has spoken from a rostrum . . . 

without lying. There is no man who has spoken into a microphone 

• . . without lying. 

But if only it had all ended there! After all, it went further 

than that: every conversation with the management, every conversation 

in the Personnel Section, every conversation of liny 

kind with any other Soviet person called for lies-sometimes 

head on, sometimes looking over your shoulder, sometimes 

indulgently affirmative. And if your· idiot interlocutor said to 

you face to fag: that we were retreating to the Volga in order 

to decoy Hitler farther, or that the Colorado beetles had been 

dropped on us by the Americans-it was necessary 'to agree! It 

was Obligatory to agree! (And a sh8ke of the head instead of a 

nod might well cost you resettlement in the Archipelago. Remember 

the arrest of Chulpenyov, in Part I, Chapter 7.) 

But that was not all: Your children were growing up! If they 

weren't yet old enough, you and your wife had to avoid saying 

openly in front of them what you really thought; after all, they 

were .being brought up to be Pavlik Morozovs, to betray their 

own parents, and they wouldn't hesitate to repeat his achievement. 

And if the children were still little, then you had to decide 

what was the best way to bring them up; whether to start them off 

on lies instead of the truth (so that it would be easier for them to 

live) and then to lie forevermore in front of them toO\ or to tell 


them- the truth, with the risk that they might make a slip, that 

they might let it out, which meant that you had to instill into 

them from the start that the truth was murderous, that beyond' 

the threshold of the house you had to lie, only lie, just like papa 

and mama. , 

The choice was really such that you would rather not have 

any children. , " 

The lie as ·the continuing basis of life: A young, intelligent 

woman, A.K., who understood everything, came from the capital 

to teach literature in a higher-education institute in the provinces. 

Her security questionnaire had no black marks on it, an,d she had 

. a brand-new candidate's degree. In her principal course she saw 

she had only one Party member and decided that .this girl was 

the one who was bound to be the stool pigeon. (There had to be 

a stool pigeon in every courso-of that A.K. was convinced.) 

And so she decided to become. all buddy-buddy with this Party 

member and pretend friendship with her. (Incidentally, according 

to the tactics of the Archipelago this waS a.complete miscalculation; 

What she should have done, on the contrary, was to paste 

a couple of failing grades on her at the start and then any denunciations 

would have looked like sour grapes.) And so these 

two used to meet outside the institute and exchanged photographs. 

(The girl student carried A.K.'s photograph around in 

her Party card case.) During .holiday time they corresponded 

tenderly. And in every lecture A.K. tried to play up to the possible 

evaluations of her Party student. Four years of th~s humiliating 

pretense went by, the student completed her course, and by this 

time her conduct was a matter of indifference to A.K., so when 

she made her first return visit to the school, A.K. received her 

with deliberate coldness. The offended student demanded her 

photograph and letters back and exclaimed (the most dolefully 

amusing thing about it was that she probably wasn't a stool 

pigeon): "If I finish my degree, I will never cling to this pitiful 

institute the way you do! And what lectures you gave-..:...as dull 

as dishwater!" 

. Yes, by impoverishing everything, bleaching it out, and clipping 

it to suit the perceptions of a stool pigeon, A.K. ruined her 

lectures, when she was capable of delivering them brilliantly. 

As a certain poet said: It wasn't a cult of personality we had, 

but a cult of hypocrisy. 

Here, too, of course, one has to distinguish between degrees:

Our Muzzled Freedom · I 649 

between the forced, defensive lie and the oblivious, passionate 

lie of the sort our writers distinguished themselves at most of all, 

the sort of lie in the midst of whose tender emotion Marietta 

Shaginyan could write in 1937 (!) that the epoch of socialism 

had transformed even criminal interrogation: the stories of inter-. 

rogators showed that nowadays the persons being interrogated 

willingly cooperated with them, telling everything that was required 

about themselves and others .. 

And the lie has, in fact, l¢ us so far away from- a normal 

society that you cannot even orient yourself any longer; in its 

dense, gray fog not even one pillar can be seen. All of a sudden, 

thanks to footnotes, you figure out that Yakubovich's book In 

the World of the Outcasts was published, although under a 

pseudonym, at the very same time the author was completing 

his Tsarist hard-labor sentence and being sent off into exile.u 

Wen, now, just-add that up, just add $at up and compare it with 

us! Compare that with the way my-belated and shy novella managed 

to get out in the open by a miracle, and then they firmly 

lowered the barriers, bolted things up tightly, and locked the 

locks. And now it is forbidden to write not merely about something 

taking place in the present but even about things that took 

place thirty and fifty years ago. And will we ever read about them 

during our lifetime? We are destined to go to our graves still 

inunersed in lies and falsehoods. 

Moreover, even if they offered us the chance to learn the truth, 

would our free people even want to know it? Y. O. Oksman returned 

from the camps in 1948, and was not rearrested, but lived 

in Moscow. His friends and acquaintances did not abandon him; 

but helpe4 him. But they did not want to hear his recollections of 

camp! Because if they knew about that-how could they go on 

living? 

After the war a certain song became very po~ar: ''The Noise 

'of the City Cannot Be Heard." No singer, even the most mediocre, 

could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause. 

The Chief Administration of Thoughts and Feelings did not at 

first grasp what was going on, and they allowed it to be performed 

on the radio and on the stage. After all, it was Russian and had 

a ·folk motif. And then suddenly they discovered what it was all 

S. At the very time when that hard labor actually existed! It was about 

convict hard labor which was contemporary with it, and not allegedly in the 

irrevocable past. 

650 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELA"GO 

about-and -they immediately crossed it off the permitted list. 

The words of the song were about a doomed prisoner, about 

lovers torn apart. The need to repent existed still and it stirred, 

and people who were steeped in lies could at least applaud that 

old song with all their hearts. 

9. Cruelty. And where ~ong all the preceding qualities was"" 

there any place left for kindheart~nes? How could one possibly 

preserve one's kindness while pushing away the hands of those 

who were drowning? Once you have been steeped in blood, you 

can only become more cruel. And, anyway, cruelty ("class 

cruelty") was praised and instilled, and you would soon lose 

track, probably, of just where between bad and good that trait 

lay. And when you add that kindness was ridiculed, that pity 

was ridiculed, that mercy was ridiculed-you'd never be able to 

chain all those who were drunk on blood! 

My nameless woman correspondent, from Arbat No. 15, asks 

me "about the roots of the cruelty" characteristic of "certain 

Soviet people." Why is it that the Cruelty they manifest is proportionate 

to the defenselessness- of the person in their power? And 

she cites an example-which is not at all what one might regard 

as the main one, but which I am going to cite here anyway. 

This took place in the winter of 1943-1944 at the Chelyabinsk 

railroad station, under a canopy near the baggage checkroom. 

It was minus 13 degrees. BeIleath the shed roof was a cement 

floor, on which was trampled sticky snow from outside. Inside 

the window of the baggage checkroom stood a woman in a 

padded jacket, and on the "nearer side was a well-fed policeman 

in a tanned sheepskin coat. They were absorbed in a kittenish, 

flirtatious conversation. Several men lay on the floor in earthcolored 

cotton duds and rags. Even to call them threadbare would 

be rank flattery. These were young fellows--emaciated, swollen, 

with sores on their lips. One of them, evidently in a fever, lay' 

with bare chest on the snow, groaning. The woman telling the 

story approached him to ask who they were, and it turned out 

that one of them had served out his" term in camp, another had 

been released for illness, but that their documents had been made 

out incorrectly when they were released, and as a result they 

could not get tickets to go h9me on the train. And they had no 

strength left to return to camp either-they were totally fagged 

out With diarrhea. So then the woman telling the story began to

Our MuuledFreedom 651 

break: off pieces of bread for them. And at this point the policeman 

broke off his jolly conversation and said to her threateningly: 

"What's going on, auntie, have you recognized your 

relatives? You better get out of here. They will die without your 

help!" And so she thought to herself: After all, they'll up and 

haul me in just like thlit and .put me in prison! (And that was 

quite right, what was to stop them?) And ... she went away. 

How typical all this is of our society-what she thought to 

herself, and how she went away, and that pitiless policeman, 

and that pitiless woman in the padded jacket, and that cashier 

at the ticket window who refused them tickets, and that nurse 

who refused to take them into the city hospital, and that idiotic 

free employee at the camp who had made· out their documents. 

It was a fierce and a vicious life, and by this time, you would 

not, as in Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, call a prisoner "an unfortunate," 

but, if you please, only "rot." In 1938 Magadan school 

.pupils threw stones at a column of women prisoners (as Surovtseva 

recalls). . 

Had our country ever known before, or does any other country 

know today, so many repulsive and divisive apartment and family 

quarrels? Every reader will be able to speak of many, and we 

will mention just one or two. 

In a communal apartment on Dolomanovskaya Street in Rostov 

lived Vera Krasutskaya, whose husband .was arrested and 

perished in .1938. Her neighbor, Anna Stolberg, knew about 

this, and for eighteen years-from 1938 to 1956-reveled in 

her power and tormented Krasutskaya with threats; catching her 

in the kitch~n or in the corridor, she would hiss ·at Krasutskaya: 

"If I say so, you can go on living, but I 'Only have to say the ·word 

and the Black Maria will ,,"ome for you." And it was only in 1956 

that Krasutskaya decided to write a complaint to the prosecutor. 

And Stolberg then shut up. But they continued to live together 

in the same aparpnent. 

After the arrest of Nikoll!-i" Yakovlevich Semyonov in 1950 

in the city of Lyubim, his wife, that very winter, kicked out his 

mother, Mariya TIinichna Semyonova, who had been living with 

them: ·"Get out of here, you old witchl Your son is an enemy ot 

the people!" (Six years later, when her husband returned from 

camp, she and her grown-up daughter, Nadya, drove him out 

into the street at night in his underpants. Nadya was so eager to 

do this because she needed the space for her own husband. And . 


when she threw his trousers in her father's face, she shouted at 

hipt: "Get out of here, you old rat!")' When Semyonov's 

mother was kicked out of that apartment, she went to her childless 

daughter Anna in Yaroslavl. Soon the mother got on her daughter's 

and her son-in-Iaw's nerves. And her son-in-law, Vasily 

Fyodorovich Metyolkin, a-meman, on his off-duty days, used to 

take his mother-in-Iaw's face in the- palms of his hands, hold it 

, tight so she couldn't turn away from him, and amuse himseH by 

- spitting in her face till he had no spit left, trying to hit her'm the 

eyes and mouth. And when he was really angry, he would take 

out his penis and shove it in the old woman's face: ''Take it, 

suck it, and die!" His- wife explained his conduct to her brother 

when he returned: "Well, what can I do when Vasya is drunk? 

. . . What can you expect from a drunk?" And then, in order 

to get a new apartment ("We need a bathroom because there is 

no place to wash our old mother and we certainly can't drive her 

• out to a public bath"), they began to treat her tolerably well. 

And when-"because of her""-they had got a new apartment, 

they packed the rooms with chests of drawers and sideboards, 

and pushed her into a cranny between' the wardrobe ,and the wall 

fourteen inches wide--and told' her to lie there and not stick her 

,head out. And N. Y. Semyonov himseH, who was by then livin$ 

with his, son, took the risk, without asking his son, of bringing 

his mother home. The, grandson came home. The grandmother , 

sank down on her knees before him: "Vovochka, you're not going 

to kick me out?" And the grandson grimaced: "Oh, all right, live 

here until I get married." And it is quite apropos to add in regard 

to that same granddaughter Nadya:..-Nadezhda Nikolayevna 

Topnikova-that around this time sh~ completed the course in 

the historical and philological faculty of the Yaroslavl Pedagogical 

Institute, entered-,the Party, and became an editor of the district 

newspaper in the city of Neya in Kostroma Province. She was 

a poetess as well, and in 1961, while she was still in Lyubim, she 

rationalized her conduct in verse: 

If you're' going to fight, then re~y fight! 

Your father!? Give it to him in the neck! 

6. V. I. Zhukov recounts an exactly similar story from KovroV: his wife drove 

him out ("Get out, or I will have you jailed agaili.I")·, as did his stepdaughter 

("Get out, jailbirdl").

Morals!! People dreamed them up! 

I don't want to hear of them! 

In my life I'll march ahead 

Solely with cold calculation! 

Our Muzzled Freedom 

1'(;53 

But her Party organization began to demand that she "normalize" 

her relationship with her father, and she suddenly began to write 

to him. Overjoyed, the father replied ·with an all-forgiving letter, 

'which she immediately ran to show her Party organization. And 

when they saw it, they put a check mark opposite her name, and 

that was that. And since then all he gets from her are greetings 

on the great May and November holidays. 

Seven people were involved in this tragedy. And so there you 

have one little droplet of our freedom. 

In better-brought-up families, they do not chase a relative who 

has suffered unjustly out onto the street iii. his underwear, but 

they are ashamed of him, and they feel burdened and imposed 

upon by his bitterly "distorted" world outlook. . 

And one could go on enumerating further. One could name 

in addition: 

10. Slave Psychology. That same unfortunate Babich in his 

declaration to the prosecutor: "I understand that wartime placed 

more serious obligations and duties on the organs of government 

than to sort out the charges against individual persons." 

And much else. 

But let us admit: if under Stalin this whole scheme ~f things 

did not just come into being on its own-and if, instead, he 

. himself worked it all out for us point by point-he really was a 

genii.Js! 

• 

So there in that stinking damp world in which only executioners 

and the most blatant of betrayers flourished, where those who 

remained honest became drunkards, since they had no strength 

of will for anything else, in which the bodies of young people 

were bronzed by the sun while their· souls putrefied inside, in 

which every night the gray-green hand reached out and collared 

someone in order to pop him into a box-in that world dons 


, 

of )Vomen wandered about lost and blinded, whose husbands, 

sons, or fathers had been .tom from them and dispatched to the 

Archipelago. They were the most scared of all. They feared 

shiny nameplat~, office doors, telephone rings, knocks on the 

door, the postman, the milkwoman, and the plumber. And everyone 

in whose path they stood drove them from their apartments, 

from their work, and from the city. 

Sometimf:!! they trustingly based their hopes on the belief that 

a sentence "without the right of correspondence" was to be understood 

as meaning just1hat, and that when ten years had passed, 

he would write. 7 They. stood in line outside prisons. They went 

distances of fifty miles and more to places where, they had heard, 

food parcels were accepted for mailing. Sometimes they· themselves 

died before the death of their relative in prison. Sometimes 

they learned the date of death only from the notation on a food 

par,?el that had been returned, which read: "Addressee ·died in 

hospital." Sometimes, as in the case of Olga Chavchavadze, who 

got to Siberia, carrying to her husband's grave a handful of the 

soil of his native land, they arrived on such a mission only to find 

that no one could tell them which mound he lay under together 

with three other corpses. Sometimes, as in the case of Zelma 

Zhugur, they kept on writing letters to be delivered by hand to 

some Voroshilov or other, forgetting that Voroshilov's conscience 

had died long before he died himself. 8 

And these women had children who grew up, and for each one 

there Qame a time of extreme need when they absolutely had to 

have their father back, before it was too late, but he never came. 

A little folded triangle of school notebook paper with crooked 

handwriting. Red and blue pencils in turn; one after the otherin 

an probability a childish hand had put aside one pencil, rested, 

and then taken up a new one. Angular, inexperienced, tortuously 

written letters with breathing spaces between them and sometimes 

even within words: 

Hello Papa I forgot how to write soon in Schooi I will go through 

the first winter come quickly because it's bad we have no Papa mama 

7. Sometimes there reAlly were camps without the right of correspondence; 

not only the atomic factories of the period from 1945 to 1949,. but also, for 

example, Camp 29 of Karlag allowed no correspondence at aU for a year 

and a half. 

S. He did not even have the courase to shield his closest adjutant, Langovoi, 

from arrest and torture. .


says you are away on work or sick and what are you waiting for run 

away from that hospital here Olyeshka ran away from hospital just in 

-- his, shirt mama will sew you new pants and I will give you my belt 

all the same the boys are all afraid of me, and Otyeshenka is the 

only one i never beat up he also tells the truth he is also poor and I 

once lay in fever and wanted to die along with mother and she did 

not want to and I did not want to, oh, my hand is numb from write 

thats enough I kiss you lots of times 

Igoryok 6 and one hali years 

I already know how to write on envelopes and before mother comes 

from work I will drop the letter in the mailbox. 

Manolis Glezos, "in a clear and passionate speech," told Moscow 

writers about his comrades languishing in the prisons of 

Greece. 

"I understand that 1 have made your hearts tremble by my 

passionate speech. But 1 did it intentionally. I ':rould like to have, 

your hearts ~hefor those languishing in imprisonment. ... Raise 

ecioy~ruoy for the liberation of the-Greek Patriots."D 

And those well-worn foxes-of course, they raised their voices! 

After all, a couple of dozen prisoners were languishing in Greece! 

And maybe Manolis himself did not understand the shamelessness 

of his appeal, and maybe, too, in Greece they do not have 

the proverb: "Why grieve for others when there is sobbing at 

home?" 

In various parts of our country we find a certain piece of 

sculpture: a plaster gu~d with a police dog which is straining 

forward in order to sink its teeth into someone. In Tashkent there 

is one right in front of the NKVD school, and in Ryazan it is like 

a symbol of the city, the one 3.!ld only monumept to be seen ,~ 

you approach from the direction of Mikhailov. 

And we do not even shudder iIi revulsion. We have become 

demot~ca to these figures setting dogs onto people as if they 

were the most natural things in the world. 

' 

Setting the dogs onto us. 

9; Liiera/urnaya Gaze/a, August 27, 1963'. 

Chapter 4 

• 

Several Individual Stories 

I have fragmented the fates of all the prisoners I have previously 

mentioned in this book, subordinating their stories to the 

plan of the book-to the contours of the Archipelago. I have 

steered away from biographical accounts; it would have been 

too monotonous, it's how they write and write, shifting all the 

burden of inquiry off" the author's shoulders onto the reader's. 

But precisely because of this I consider that at this point I 

have the right to cite several prisoners' stories in their entirety. 

1. Anna Petrovna Skripnikova 

The only daughter of an ordinary worker of Maikop, Anna 

Skripnikova was born in 1896. As we already know from the 

history of the Party, under the cursed Tsarist regime all paths 

to an education were closed to her, and she was condemned to 

the half-starving life of a female slave. And all this really did 

happen to her-but after the Revolution. At the time she was 

accepted in the Maikop gymnasium. 

, Anna grew up to become a big girl who also had a large head. 

A girl who was her gymnasium friend made a drawing of her 

which consisted solely of circles: her head was round (from all 

angles), she had a round forehead and round eyes which somehow 

expressed eterIlal perplexity. The lobes of her ears rounded 

off as they grew into her cheeks. And her shoulders were round. 

And her figure was a sphere. "" 

Anna began" to think about things too soon in life. As early 

as the third grade she asked her teacher's permission to take 

656

Several Individual Stories I 657 

Dobrolyubov and Dostoyevsky from the gymnasium library. The 

teacher was indignant: "It's too soon .for you!" "All right, if you 

don't let me read them here" I'll get them .in the city library." 

At the age of thirteen "she emancipated herself from God," and 

ceased to be a believer. At the age of fifteen she pored over the 

Church fathers-exclusively for the purpose of furiously refuting 

the priest in class-to the general satisfaction of her fellow students. 

However, she herself adopted the steadfastness of the 

Russian Church schismatics as her highest model. She learned: 

It is better to die than to permit one's spiritual core to be brok~n. 

No one interfered with her receiving the gold Inedal she .deservedly 

won. 1 In 1917 (what a time for study!) She. went to 

Moscow and enterc;d Chaplygin's Advanced School for Women 

in the department of philosophy and psychOlogy. As a gold 

medalist she was paid, till the October coup, a State Duma scholarship. 

This department prepared teachers of logic and psychology 

·for the gymnasiums. Throughout 1918, e~g money by 

giving lessons, she studied psychoanalysis. She apparently remained 

an atheist, but she felt with her whole soul how . 

. . . immovably on the fiery roses 

The living altar of creation smokes. 

She managed to pay her dues to the poetical philosophy of Giordano 

Bruno and of Tyutchev and. even at one time considered 

herself an Eastern Catholic. She changed faiths greedily, perhaps 

more often than her dresses. (There were no dresses, and she did 

not pay all that much attention to them anyway.) And, in addition, 

at the beginning she considered herself a socialist and that 

the blood of revolt and civil war was inevitable. But she could 

not reconcile herself to terror. Democracy,. but not atrocitiesl 

"Let hands be steeped in blood, but .not in mud!" 

At the end of 1918 she had to leave the school. (And did the 

school exist any longer· anyway?) With great difficulty she managed 

to make her way to her parents ... where the food situation 

was better. She arrived in Maikop. An Institute of People's Education 

for adults and for young people had already been created 

there. Anna became no more and no fess than an acting professor 

of logic, philosophy, and psycholOgy. She was popular with the 

students. 

1. But wbat if a schoolgirl challenged lhe· basis of Marxism tbat way today? 

658' I THE GULAG ARCHIPE.LAGO 

During this period the Whites were living out their last days 

in Maikop. A forty-five-year-old general tried to persuade .her 

to flee with !tim. "General, call off the show! Escape before you 

are arrested!" In those days, at a party for teachers, among themselves, 

a gymnasium history teacher proposed a toast: "To the 

great Red Army!" Anna rejected the toast: "Not for anything!" 

Knowing her leftist views; her friends' eyes popped out. "Because 

•.. notwithstanding the eternal stars ..• ' therewill·be more and 

more executions," she prophesied. . 

She had the feeling that all the best people were perishing in 

this war and only the opportunists were surviving. She already 

had a presentiment that her great moment was approaching, but 

she still did not know . . . what it would be. . 

Several days later the Reds entered Maikop. And a little later 

a meeting of the city intelligentsia was assembled. The chief of 

the Special Section of the Fifth Army, Losev, came out on the 

, stage and, in a menacing tone, not far from cursing, began to 

abuse the "rotten intelligentsia": "What? Sitting on the fence, 

were you? Waiting for me to invite you? Why didn't you come 

on your own?" Getting wilder and wilder, he pulled his revolver 

out of its holster and, brandishing it, screamed: "Your whole 

culture is rotten! We are going to destroy it and build a new one. 

And if any of you interfere-we will eliminate you!"! And after 

that he proposed: "Who wants to speak?" 

The hall was as silent as the grave. There was not one single 

bit of applause, and no hand was lifted. (The hall was silent 

because it was frightened, but the fright was not yet rehearsed, 

and people did not know that it was compulsory for them to 

applaud,) . 

In all probability Losev did not think that anyone would rise 

. to speak, bilt Anna stood up. "I." "You?" said he rudely. "Well, 

climb up here, climb up." And she walked the length of the 

hall and mounted the stage. A big woman, with a big face, even 

with rosy cheeks, this twenty-five-year-old woman was of the 

generous Russian type (she got only an eighth of a pound of 

bread, but her father had a good garden). Thick auburn braids 

reached to her knees, but as an active professor she could not go 

around with them like that and had them twisted on top of her 

2. Whoever has read Kry1enko's speeches in Part I, Chapter 8, already 

knows all about this.


head, giving herself a second head. And she replied resoundingly: 

"We have heard out your ignorant speech. You summoned us 

here, but it was not announced that it was to bury the great 

culture of Russia! We came here expecting to see a culture-bearer 

and found a gravedigger. You would have done better simply to 

curse us out than to say what you did today! And so are we 

supposed to understand that you speak in the name of Soviet 

power?" 

"Yes," the already taken aback Losev nonetheless affirmed 

proudly. 

"Well, if the Soviet government.is going to have such bandits 

as you as its representatives, it will fall apart." 

Anna had finished, and the whole hall applauded ringingly. 

(Being all together, they were not yet afraid.) And the evening 

came to an end on that note. Losev found nothing else to say. 

People came up to Anna, pressed her hand in the thick of the 

crowd, and whispered: "You are done for. They are going to 

arrest you right away, but thank you, thank you! We are proud 

of you, but you ... are done for! What have you done?" 

At home the Chekists were waiting for her. "Comrade teacher! 

How poorly you live-a ,desk, two chairs, and a cot-there's 

nothing to search. We have never arrested someone like you 

before. And your father is a worker. How is it that being so 

poor you could go over to the side of the bourgeoisie?" The 

Cheka had not yet got itself organized, and they brought Anna 

to a room in the chancellery of the Special Branch where the 

White Guard Colonel Baron Bilderling was already under arrest. 

(Anna w~tnesed his interrogation and his execution, and later 

on she went and told his widow: "He died honorably, be proud!") 

They took her for questioning to the room where Losev was 

living and working. When she entered, he was sitting on his 

stripped bed in his field britches and an unbuttoned undershirt, 

scratching his chest. Anna immediately demanded of the guard: 

"Take me out of here!" Losev growled: "All right, I'll wash up 

and put on those kid gloves in which people make the Revolution." 

For one week she awaited her death sentence in a state of 

ecstasy. Skripnikova now recalls this as the brigntest week of her 

life. If these words are to be understood in their precise meaning, 

we c.an believe them completely. That is the kind of ecstasy which 

descends upon the soul as a reward when you have cast aside all 

660 'I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 

hopes for impossible salvation and have steadfastly given yourself 

over to a great deed. (Love of life destroys this ecstasy.) 

She did not-yet know that the city intellectuals had delivered 

a petition asking that she be parclolJed. (At the end of the twentieS 

this would not have been of any help. And in the beginning' 

of the thirties no one would have been willing to sign.) Losev 

began to take a conciliatory line in interrogating her: 

"In all the cities I have captured, I have never met anyone as 

mad as you. The city is in a state of siege, and all power here is 

in my' hands, and you called m~ gravedigger of Russian cul-' 

turel Well, all right, we both lost our tempers .... Take back 

'bandit' and 'hooligan:" 

"No. I still think the same about you." , 

"They keep coming to me from morning to night to ask for 

you. In the name of the honeymoon of Soviet power I am going 

to have to let you out .... " 

Th'ey let her out. Not because they considered her speech 

harmless,. but because she was a worker's daughter. They would 

not have forgiven a doctQr's daughter that.8 

That is how Skripnikova began her journey through prisons. 

In 1922 she was held in the· Krasnodar Cheka, confined there 

for eight months ''for acquaintance with a suspicious individual." 

There was epidemic typhus and great congestion in that prison. .' 

They gave a bread ration amounting to somewha~ less than two 

ounces per day, made from adi~ves too. In her presence a child 

died in the arms of the woman sitting next to her. And Anna 

took an oath never to have a child under such socialism as tIPs, 

never to let herself be tempted by motherhood. 

She kept this oath. She lived out her life without a family, 

and her fate, her unwillingness to compromise, provided her more 

than once with the chance to retUrn to prison. 

Then began what was supposed to be a peaceful life. In 1923 

Skripnikova went to enter the Institute of Psychology at M~scow 

State University. In filling out the security questionnaire, she 

wrote: "Not a Marxist." Out of kindness of heart her interviewers 

advised -her: "Are you crazy? Who writes answers like that? 

State that you're a Marxist, and think whatever you please." 

"But I have no wish to deceive th~ Soviet government. I have 

simply never read Marx .... " "Well, all the more so in that case." 

3. In 1920 Losev himself was shot for banditry and violence in the Crimea.


"No. When I get around to studying Marxism and if I 'accept 

it ... " And for the time being she took a job teaching in a school 

for defectives. 

In 1925 the husband of her close friend, an SR, fled to escape 

arrest III order to force him to return, the GPU seized as hostages 

(iD. the midst of the NEP---hostages?) his wife and her friend, 

that is, Anna. She was just exactly the same round-faced, bigbuilt 

woman with tresses that reachC?d down to her knees when 

she entered her cell in the Lubyanka. (This is where the interrogator 

assured her: "All those flourishes of the Russian intelligentsia 

are out, of date! lust look after yourself.") This time' 

she was imprisoned about a month. - 

In 1927, for participating in a m~ical societY of teachers and 

workers, doomed to be destroyed as a possible nest of freethinking, 

Anna was arrested for what was by then the fourth ti,me. She 

got five years and served them out on Solovki and the Belomor 

Canal. 

, From 1932 on they did not touch her again for a long time, yes, 

and evidently she lived more carefully. Begimiing with 1948, however, 

they began to fire her from her jobs. In 1952 the Institute of 

Psychology retUrned to her her already accepted dissertation 

("The Psychological Conception of Dobrolyubov") ,on the 

grounds of her having received in 1927 a sentence based on 

Article 58! In this difficult time (she was already in her fourth 

year of unemployment) a hand reached oufto help her from .... 

State Security! LiBov, a representative 'of the central State Security 

aparat~s (well, now, here is Losev again I Was he alive?' 

How little had changed even in the letters! Just that he did not' 

stick up his head openly, like an elk-"los"-but sniffed and 

darted like a fox-"lisa"), who had arrived in Vladikavkaz, 

proposed that she collaborate, in return for which work would 

be arranged for her and she would be allowed to defend her 

dissertation. Proudly she turned him down. Then they nimbly 

cooked up a charge that eleven years earlier (!), in 1941, she 

had said: 

,; that we had been poorly prepared for the war (and had we 

been well prepared?); 

• that the German armies were deployed along our borders, 

and that we were sending them grain (and were we not?). 

662 I THE GULAG AR,CHIPELAGO 

And on this occasion she got ten years and l~ded in the Special 

Camps, first Dubrovlag in Mordvinia, then Kamyshlag at Suslavo 

Station in Kemerovo Province. 

Sensing that impenetrable wall in front of her, she thought up 

the idea of writing petitio:QS not just anywhere; but . . . to the 

United Nations! During Stalin's lifetime she sent off three of 

them. This was not just some sort of trick-not at all! She actually, 

genuinely eased her eternally bubbling soul by, speaking in 

her mind's eye with the UN. She actually, during these decades 

of cannibalism, had seen no other light in the world. Itf" these 

petitions she lashed out at the savage ~rany ~ the Soviet Union 

and asked the UN to intervene with the Soviet government and 

request it either to reinvestigate her case or else to have her - 

executed, since she could no longer go on living under this terror. 

She ~ould address the envelopes "personally" to one or anolJ!.er 

of the Soviet leaders, and inside lay the request that it be 

sent on to the UN. 

In Dubrovlag she was summoned by a clique of the infuriated 

bosses: "How dare you write to the UN?" 

Skripnikova stood there, as always, erect, large, majestic: 

"Neither in the Criminal Code nor in the Code of Criminal 

Procedure nor in the Constitution itself is it forbidden. And 

you ought not to have opened envelopes addressed personally 

to members of the government!" 

In 1956 an "unloading" commission of the Supreme Soviet 

was functioning in their camp. The only task of this commission 

was to free as many zeks as possible as quickly as possible. There 

was a certain modest procedure, which consisted in having the 

zek say several apologetic words and stand there a bit with 

drooping head. But no, Anna Skripnikova was not that. kind! 

Her own personal release was nothing in comparison with common 

justice! How could she accept forgiveness if she was inno 

~tnec And she declared to the commission: 

"Don't be so overjoyed! All accessories to Stalin's terror are 

going to have to answer to the people sooner or later. I do not 

}m()W' whom you were personally under Stalin, Citizen Colonel, 

but if you were an accessory to his. terror, then you, too, are 

going to be sitting on the defendant's bench." 

The members of the commission gulped in fury, shouted that

Several Individual Stories J 6~3 

she .was insulting the Supreme Soviet in their persons, that this 

would cost her plenty, and that she would just go on serving 

time from one toll of the gong to the next. 

A:iJ.d in actual fact. because of her vain faith in Justice, she had 

to serve:: three extra years. 

From Kamyshlag she sometimes continued to write to the UN. 

(In seven years, up to 1959, she wrote a total of eighty petitions 

to various institutions.) In 1958, because of these letters, she was 

sent for one year to the Vladimir Political Prison.' And there 

they had a rule: once in every ten days they would ac~pt a 

petition directed to any.authority. During a half-year she sent 

eighteen declarationS from there to different institutions-includevlewt~ni 

to the UN. 

And she got her way in the end. She got . . . not execution 

but a re-examination of her case-the cases of 1927' .and of 

1952. She said to the interrogator: "Well, what do you want? A 

petition- to the UN is· the only means of kn~king a hole in the 

wall of Soviet bureaucracy and compelling the deaf Themis at 

least to hear something." . 

The !J1terrogator jumped. up and beat his breast: "All the 

accessories to the 'Stalinist terror' -as you for' some reason [I] 

call the personality cult-will answer to the people? And what 

am 1 to answer for? What other policy could I execute. at that 

time? Yes, I believed Stalin without any doubts and I did not 

know anything." 

But Skripnikova kept hitting away -at him: "No, no, you can't 

get away with that! One has to bear the responsibility for every 

crime! Wh9 is supposed to answer for the deaths of millions of 

innocents? For the flower of the nation and the flower of the 

Party? The dead Stalin? The executed Beria? While you pursue 

your political career?" 

(Her own blood pressure at this moment was rising to -the 

danger point, she shut her eyes~ and everything whirled and 

flamed.) 

And they would still have detained her, but in 1959 a case 

of this sort Was a real curiOSity. 

And in the yelU'S _that followed-and she is alive right nQw 

-her life has been filled with solicitations on behalf of those 

still imprisoned or in exile, and those whose sentences still remain 

on the records--those whom she met in camps in recent 

664 _! THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO 

years. She got several of them released. She got others· rehabilitated. 

She has also undertaken the defense of those who live 

in her own city. The city authorities are afraid of her pen and 

the envelopes she sends off to Moscow, and in some degree they 

make concessions to her. 

~nA if everyone were even one-quarter as implacable as Anna 

Skripnikova-the history of Russia would be different; 

2. Stepan VasUyevich Loshehilin 

He 'Yas born in 1908 in the Volga region, the son of a worker 

at the paper factory. In 1921, during the famine, he was orphaned. 

He grew up to be a lad who was not very bold, and 

nevertheless at the age of seventeen he was already a member of 

the Komsomol, and at the age of eighteen he entered a school for 

peasant youth, and completed it at the age of tWenty-one. At 

this time they were sent out to help in compulsory exactions of 

breadgrains, and in 1930 in his own native village he participated 

in the liquidation of the kulaks. He did not remain behind, 

however, to build the collective farm there, but "got a reference" 

from the village soviet aDd with it went off to Moscow. He 

had diffict¥ty in finding a job . . . as a manual laborer at a 

construction project. (This was a' period of unemployment, 

and people were swarming into Moscow especially at this time.) 

A year later he 'was called up into the army, and there he was 

accepted as a candidate member and later as a full member of 

the Party. At the end of 1932 he was demobilized and returned 

to Moscow. However, he did not wish to be a manual laborer 

and he wanted to acquire a skill, so he asked the district committee 

of the Party to assign him as an apprentice at a factory. 

But evidently he was a pretty incompetent sort of Communist 

because they turned down even this request, and instead o~ered 

him an assignment to the police. 

And at this point-he refused. Had he taken a different turn, 

this biography wouldn't have been written. But this he refused. 

As a young fellow he was ashamed ,to admit to the girls that 

he was only a manual laborer, tha~ he had no profession. But 

there was _ nowhere he could get that profession! And he went 

to work at the '~Kalibr" factory, once more as a manual laborer. 

-At a Party meeting there he naively spoke out in defense of a


worker whom the Party bureau had evidently marked down 

ahead of time for. purging. They purged that particular worker 

just as they had planned, and they began to move in on Loshchilin. 

The Party dues he had collected from others were stolen 

from his barracks-and he was unable to make up the missing 

ninety-three rubles out of his own wages. At that point they 

expelled him from the Party and threatened to prosecute him. 

(Does the loss of Party dues really come under the terms of the 

Criminal Code?) Already in a state of depression, Loshchilin 

did not appear at work one day. He was fired for absenteeism. 

With a reference like that he co,ud not get work anywhere for 

a long, long time. An interrogator kept after him for a while 

and then left him alone. He kept expecting atrial-but there 

was.none. And suddenly a verdict in absentia was handed down 

against liim: six months of forced labor with a fine of 25 percent 

of his pay, to be served through the municipal Bureau of Corrective 

Labor .(the BITR). . 

In September, 1937, Loshchilin went to the buffet at the 

Kiev Station. (What do we know of our "lives? What if he had 

just gone hungry for another fifteen minutes and gone to a buffet 

in a different place? . . .) Perhaps he had some sort of lost or 

seeking expression on his face? He himself does> not know. A 

young woman in the uniform of the NKVD· came toward him. 

(Is that the kind of thing you ought to be doing, woman?) 

She asked him: ''What are you looking for? Where are you 

going?" "To the buffet." She pointed to a door: "'Go on in 

there." Loshchilin, of course, obeyed her. (She should h.&ve 

spoken· like that to an Englishman!) This was the office of the' 

Special Branch. An official sat behind the desk: The woman 

said: "Detained during tour of the station." And ~he went out, 

and never in his life did Loshchilin see her again. (And we, 

too, will never learn anything about her! ... ) The official, without 

offering him a seat, began to question him. He took all his 

documents away from him and sent him to a room for detained 

persons. There were two men there already, and, as Loshchilin 

himself relates, "this time without permission [!l I sat down 

next to them on an unoccupied chair." All three kept silent 

for a long time. Policemen came and led them off to Cells for 

Preliminary Detention. A policeman ordered them to turn over 

ri~ht money to him, because, allegedly, in the cell "it would 


be taken from them anyway." (What -a remarkable identity 

there is between the police and the thieves!) Loshchilin lied, 

saying that he had no money. They "began to search him, and 

they took away his money once and for all. And gave him back 

his makhorka. With two packets "of makhorka he entered his 

first cell, and put the makhotka on the table. No one else, of 

course, had anything to smoke. 

They took ~ just once from the Cell for PreIiminary Detention 

to the interrogator, who asked him whether he was a 

thief, (And what a rescue that would have been for him! He 

should have said then and there that, yes, he was a thief" but 

never caught. And the worst that would have happened to him 

woUld have been to be sent out of Moscow.) But Loshchilin 

replied proudly: "I live by my own labor." And the interrogator 

directed no other ch~es at him, and .the interrogation came 

to an "end with that, and there was no trial! 

He was imprisoned in the Cell for PreIiminary Detention for 

ten days, and then at night they took them all to Ule Moscow 

CriIninal Investigation Department on Petrovka Street. Here 

things were crowded and stifling, and it waS impossible to get 

through. The thieves were the rulers here. They took things 

away from the prisoners and lost them at cards. Here for the 

first time Loshchilin was astonished by ''their strange boldness, 

their insistence on some kind of incomprehensible superiority." 

One night the authorities began to haul them all "off to the transit 

" prison on Sretenka (that was where it was before Krasnaya 

Ptesnya). And there it was even more crowded. People sat on 

the floor and took turns on the bunks. To those who were only 

half-clothed-left in this state by the thieves--the police issued 

clothing-bast sandals and old police uniforms. " 

Among those sent there with Loshchilin were many others 

who also had never been formally charged with anything, never 

called to court or tried-but they were transported just like 

those who had been sentenced. They took them to Perebory, 

where they filled out an invoice for those who had arrived, and 

it was only when he got there that Loshchilin found his section: 

SVE-Socially Harmful Element, sentence four years. (To this 

very day he is in a state of dismay: After aII', my father was a 

worker, and I myself am a worker, and "why then: was I an SVE? 

It would have been a different matter if I had been Ii trader .... ) 

",

Several Individual Stories _I 667 

. Volgolag. Logging. A ten-hour workday and no days off 

except the November and May holidays. (And this was three 

whole years before the war!) And once Loshchilin broke his 

leg and had an operation and spent four months. in the hospital 

and three on crutches. And then he was again sent to logging. 

And so it was that he served out his four-year term. The war 

began, but nonetheless he was not considered a 58, and in the 

autumn of 1941 he was released. Just before being released 

Loshchilin had his pea jacket stolen, but it was registered on· 

his equipment card. And how he begged the trusties to write off 

that cursed pea jacket-but no! They refused to take pity on 

him! They took the cost of the pea jacket out of his "release 

fundtt-double the cost, in fact! And the goveniment inventory 

prices for those tom cotton-padded treasures were very dear. 

And so on a cold autumn day they let him out of the camp gates 

in a cotton camp shirt, with scarcely any· money, or any bread 

or even a herring for the road. The gatehouse guards searched 

him at the exit and wished him good speed. 

And so he was plundered on the day of his release, jiIst as 

he had been on the day of his arrest. 

When the documents were being written up in the office of the 

chief of the Cl~ification and Records Section, Loshchilin 

managed to read upside down what was written in his file. What 

was written was: "Detained during tour of station ... tt _ 

He arrived in the city of Sursk, his native area. Because he was 

ill the district military conscription commissariat exempted him 

from military service. And that, too, turned. out to be bad. In 

the autumn of 1942, under Order No. 336 of the People's 

Commissariat of Defense, the district military commissariat 

conscripted all men of call-up age who could perform physical 

labor. Loshchilin landed in the labor detachment of the Apart 

.ment Maintenance Section of the Ulyanovsk. garrison. What 

kind of. detachment this was and what the attitude toward it 

was can be judged from the fact that it contained many young 

men from the West Ukraine, whom they had managed to con 

"SCript before the war, but who had not been sent to the.front 

esu~Qeb they were u~liable. And so Loshchi.lin. l!Wded in another 

variety of the Archipelago again, a militarb.:ed: unguarded 

camp geared to accomplish the same kind of amiihilation as 

other campso-through exbaustiJ,lg the inmates' last strength. 


A ten-hour workday. In the barracks two-story bunks without 

any bedding. (When they went out to work, the barracks was· 

deserted.) They worked and went around in whatever of their 

own they had when they were taken from their homes and in their 

own underwear, without baths and without a change. They were 

paid a reduced wage, from which they were charged for bread 

(twenty-one ounces a day) and for their other food (which 

was bad and consisted of a first and second course served them 

4 twice a day). And they were even charged for the Chuvash bast 

sandals which they were issued. 

Among the detachment members one was designated the 

commandant and another the chief of the detachment. Bu( they 

had no rights. The whole show was bossed by M. Zheltov, the 

chief of the repair and construction office. He was like a prince 

who did exactly wha~ever he liked. When he gave orders, some 

of the detachment members were deprived of bread and lunch 

for one or two days at a time. ("Where was there a law like that?" 

Loshchilin asked. "Even in camp it waSn't like that.") And at 

the same time front-line soldiers recovering from wounds and' 

still weak entered the detachment. There ]Vas a woman doctor 

attached to the detachment. She had the right to release prisoners 

from work because of illness, but Zheltov forbade her to. 

And being afraid of him, she wept, and she did not hide it from 

the detachment members. (That is freedom! That is our freedom. 

for you!) Everyone got- infected with lice, and the bunks were 

swarming with bedbugs. 

But then this was no camp! They could complain! And they 

did complain. They wrote to the provincial newspaper and to the 

provincial Party committee. And there was no answer from 

anywhere. The only response came from the municipal medical 

department, which carried out a thorough disinfection, gave 

everyone a good bath, and gave everyone a set of underwear and 

some bedding-all to be charged against their wages (!). 

In. the Winter of 1944-1945, at the beginning of his third 

year in the detachment, Loshchilin's own footwear became 

simply unusab.le and he did not go .t6-work. He was then and 

there tried for absenteeism-and given three months of corrective-labor 

work in that very same detachment with a fine 'of 2S 

percent deducted from his wages. 

In the spring damp Loshchilin could no longer walk about, in


bast sandals, and once again did not go to work. Once again he 

was "Sentenced-which, if one ,

SeverallndividUill Stories I 671 

theorems, proved much later in the West), in art ~tory (on 

Russian icons, on religious drama), and on philosophical and 

religious subjects. (His archive has been in the main preserved 

and has not yet been published. I have not had access to it.) 

After the Revolution he was a professor at the Electrical Engineering 

Institute (where he delivered his lectures in his priest's 

robes). In 1927 he expressed ideas anticipating those of Wiener. 

In 1932 he published in the magazine Socialist Reconstruction 

and Science an essay on machiries· for the solution of problems 

which were close in spirit to cybernetics. Soon after that he was 

arrested. His prison career is known to me only at several separate 

points, which I list with trepidation: exile in Siberii (41 exile 

he wrote works and published them under a pseudonym in the 

works of the Siberian expedition of the Academy of Sciences), 

SolovIq, and after Solovki was shut down the Far North, and 

according to some sources the Kolyma. In the Kolyma he studied 

flora and minerals (in addition to his work with a pick). Neither 

the place nor the date of his death in camp is known. But according. 

to some rumors he waS shot during wartime. . 

I certainly intended to cite here also the life of Valentin I. 

Komov from the Yefremov District, witl;l whom I was imprisoned 

in the years 1950 to 1952 in Ekibastuz, but I simply do not re-· 

call enough about him, and I ought to have remembered more 

details. In 1929, when he was a seventeen-year-old boy, he killed 

the chairman of the lo,?al village soviet and fled~ After that the 

only way he could exist and hide was as a thief. He was imprisoned 

several times, always. as a thief. In 1941 he was released. 

The Germans carried him off to Germany. Did he collaborate 

with them? No, he ran away twice and as a result landed 

in Buchenwald. He was liberated from there by the Allies. Did 

he stay in the West? No, under his authentic family name (''The 

Motherland has forgiven, the Motherland calls you!") he returned 

to his own village, where he married and worked in the 

collective farm. In 1946 he was imprisoned under 58 for his 

1929 crime. He was released in 1955. If this biography were 

set forth in detail, it would explain much to us about the Russian 

lives of those decades. In addition, Komov-was a typical camp 

brigadier-a ~'son of Gulag." (And even in the hard-labor_ 

camp he was not afraid to shout at the chief at the general roll 

call, ~y do we have a Fascist system in.our camp?") _ 

Finally, it would have been appropriate to include in this 


chapter the biography of some socialist who was exceptionalin 

personal qualities, in the steadfastness of his views---in order 

to show his peregrinationsthtough the moves of the Big Solitaire 

over a period of many years. 

And perhaps the biography of some inveterate MVD man-a 

Garanin, or a Zavenyagm, or else someone not so well known 

-would have been highly suitable here. 

But evidently I am not fated to do all that. Breaking off this 

book at the beginning of 1967,4 I do not count on baving Ii'" 

. chance to return to the theme of the Archipelago. 

Anyway, it's enough. I have been with it ... twenty years. 

4. 1'10, completing it a year later. 

END OF PART IV

674 TRANSLATOR'S NOTES 

Translator' s Notes 

Page 

1 The Destructive-Labor Camps: This, the title of Part· III of this 

work, is a play on· words which is not as effective in English translation 

as in the original Russian. The full official title .of Soviet 

corrective-labor camps in Russian is Ispravitelno-Trudovye Lagerya. 

The author switches "corrective" labor to "destructive" labor (or 

"extermination" labor) by rendering this in abbreviated· form 

Istrebitelno-Trudovye. 

Hutzul: The Hutzuls are a mountain people of the. Carpathians who 

speak a Ruthenian dialect-and this quotation is given in that 

dialect. 

9 the shots of the cruiser Aurora: Began the October Revolution in 

Petrograd. 

9 the militia: Following· the October Revolution, when most govern 

IDental terminology was radically changed, the police were rechristened 

"the militia." This is one of the few new revolutionary 

teflIlS which has stuck, and the ordinary police in the Soviet Union 

are still called ''the militia." Throughout the rest of the book 

"militsiya" is translated as "police." 

10 Razliv: When Lenin went into hiding in July, 1917, at a time when 

he was being sought by the Provisional Government, he found 

shelter at Razliv, a summer home village about twenty miles from 

Petrograd, where he camped out in a hunter's shack. 

14 "subbotniki" (sing.: "subbotnik"): These were "voluntary Saturdays," 

in which Soviet citizens allegedly volunteered for .socially useful 

labor on their day of rest. In actual fact, as a mass movement 

sponsored by the Soviet leadership from April, 1919, on, there was 

nothing voluntary about them. 

16 Central Penal Department: The term here translated as "penal" 

could also be translated as "punitive" and is the same Russian term 

as that used in the official title "punitive detachments," which were 

sent by the Bolsheviks to carry out bloody reprisals against protest- 

673 

Page 

ing peasants.in rural areas. Hence the name Central Penal Department 

carried to Soviet ears an implication of terror. 

18 SLON: This acronym for the Northern Special Purpose Camps is 

also the Russian word for elephant. 

19 ''general work": "General-assignment work." In Russian "obshchye 

raboty"-general work or common labor. The general wor~ was 

'whatever primary work the camp was established to performlogging, 

construction, mining, heavy labor of any and all sorts. - 

23 convo)': The term in Russian is "konvoi"--escort guard. 

25 kremlin: The Russian term'''kreml'' (kremlin) refers to any fortified 

urban center or citadel-not just the one in Moscow. 

25 capercaillies: Also known as "cock of the wood"-a large European 

true grouse, the male of which is approximately the size of a wild 

turkey. 

27 ''pyatina'': A "pyatina" was one of the five administrative territories 

into which the lands of Novgorod were divided at the end of the 

fifteenth century. 

34 passing marks: The word here in Russian is "zachyoty." And there is 

a play on this term: on t~ one hand it means "passing marks" in an 

exam or a course in school, and on the other hand in Soviet prison 

life it means "time off ~ntence" given for'good work. ' 

35 Metropole Restaurant: Refers to the Metropole Hotel Restaurant in 

the center of Moscow near the Bolshoi Theatre. 

43 work assigner: Work assignment supervisor. The term in Russian 

is "naryadchik." 

44 Berry.Yagoda: In'Russian the word "yagoda" means "berry." 

59 S. A. Malsagotr: An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North, 

translated by F. H. Lyon, London, Philpot, 1926, 233 pp. 

81 I. L. Averbakh: In the Paris edition in-Russian (p. 78) the initials of 

the second editor are given as A. L. Averbakh. In the actuat book 

under reference the initials on the title page are given as I. L. 

Avet:bakh. 

84 MatVei Berman: It was said by employees of the American Embassy , 

in Moscow that the dacha or country house at Tarasovka, north of 

Moscow, rented by the Soviet government to the American Am-, 

bassador during World War II and the postwar period, had been 

built by Berman as his personal country residence. 

145 Below Sbmidtikha: This Is no doubt a reference to Academician· 

Otto Shmidt, famous Soviet polar explorer and scientist, and Chief 

of the Northern/Sea Route from 1932 to 1939. 

149 ''barshc:hIna'': "Barshchina" was the Russian equivalent of coryee. 

It was the assessment paid the Russian serf owner by his serfs'in the 

form of free labor on his lands, often amounting to three days out 

of a week. Not all Russians were under the "barshchina" system; 

about as many paid their assessment in the- form of "obrok." See 

below. 

153 "obrok" system: Russian serfs under the "obrok" system paid their 

assessment in the form of "obrok"-money and sometimes produce 

as well. Frequently the serfs had to work as hired labOrers i; factories 

or elsewhere, often at some distance from their native 

villages, in order to earn the money.


Page 

154 Arakcheyev: Count A1eksei Arakcheyev, chief minister under 

Alexander I. His name became a synonym for cruel discipline, 

particularly because of his close association with the establishment 

of the military settlements, the first of which were created i!l 1810. 

Arakcheyev became Chief of Military Settlements in 1817 and 

remained in this post until his death in 1834. The military settlements 

lasted until 1857, when they were abolished. They were an 

effort to settle army un,its on the land under strict military discipline 

and regulation of all details of village and family life. . 

160 ''Rabsila'': This was intended to be an abbreviation for "labor 

force" (rabochaya. sila), but it could also be envisioned as an abbreviation 

for "slave force", (rabskaya sila). 

168 Novy Iyerusalim: Presumably at Istra, about thirty miles northwest 

of Moscow, where the Novo-Iyt;rusalim (New Jerusalem) Monastery 

is located. 

186 your leniency •••: These are verses by Pasternak from his poem 

"Lieutenant Shmidt.:' They were quoted previously in The Gulag 

Archipelago, Vol. I, Part II, Ch. 4. (Paris edition in,Russian, p. 

605; American edition in English, p. 614.) , 

214 old works: The reference is presumably to the seizure of manuscripts 

of The First Circle and some other of Solzhenitsyn's works" described 

in some detail in Zhores Medvedev, Ten Years after Ivan 

Denisovich, New York, Knopf, 1973, Chs. 6 and 7. 

220 a book: The reference is to the novel by IIf and Petrov, The Golden 

Calf, translated by John H. Richardson, New York, Random House, 

1962. 

221 magara: A millet-like plant; the seeds were made into a cereal for 

the zeks, who regarded it as one of the more repUlsive of the 

many repulsive things they were given to eat. ' 

224 zecbka: "Zechka" is "zek" with a feminine suffix-and the term has 

a humorous twist. 

232 In my play: The play referred to is that translated into English 

under the title The Love 6irl and the Innocent by Nicholas Bethell 

and David Burg, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. 

251 trusty: The Russian term is "pridurok" (pI.: "pridurkj"). For lack of 

a better word in English this has been translate4 throughout as 

"trusty." And this is the closest one can come. The Russian term 

includes all prisoners who got themselves what were by camp standards 

soft jobs, and thus di!i not have to go out and slog away at the 

general work. The Russian term also has a markedly contemptuous 

shade, and is closely related etymologically to a whole series of 

terms referring to half-wits and those who pretend to be half-wits. 

For instance, "pridurkovaty" means silly, daft, imbecile, etc. 

256 wage laborers: The translation used here is Engels' revision of 

Samuel Moore's translation, bearing the date of 1888. 

257 (Memoirs of Sorvival): In book form: Boris A. Dyakov, Povest 0 

Perezhitom, Moscow, Sovietskaya Russiya Publishing House, 1966, 

263 pp. 

260 the magic chain: The full text: "the magic chain of Koshchei." Koshchei 

the Deathless is an evil sorcerer in Russian fairy tales. And 

the'reference here is presumably to the famous fairy tale "Marya 


Page 

Moryevna," in which Koshchei broke the twelve chains binding 

him after he had been given three pails of water to drink successively 

by the story's hero, Prince _ Ivan. 

260 sharasbka: A "sharashka" was a special prison in which imprisoned 

scientists and technicians were put to work on important secret 

scientific assignments. Solzhenitsyn has described the Marfino 

"sharashka" in his novel The First Circle. (Also called a "sharaga.") 

262 Young Guard: The reference is to the story told in A. Fadeyev, 

The Young Guard, a Novel, Moscow; Foreign Languages Publishing 

House, no date. The original version Of this famous war story of 

young people who carried on underground resistance activities in 

the German rear in Krasnodon had to be rewritten by the author 

in the postwar period at the demand of the Party, to stress the role 

of the Komsomol and the Communist Party in directing underground 

resistance. 

276 KleinmikheJ: The reference is to Pyott Andreyevich Kleinmikhel, 

Minister for Ways of Communication, under Tsar Nicholas I, in 

charge of building the railway from SI. Petersburg to Moscow, 

Russia's firsfmajor railway. Kleinmikhel had a reputation for ruthlessness 

and overexpenditure of government funds. 

277 this very same peasant who had fed the two generals: The reference 

is to the short story by M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin, ·"A Story About 

How One Peasant Fed Two Generals." -. 

277 Dr. Pravdlu: "Pravda" in Russian means "truth." 

281 Span'ow Hills: Rechristened the "Lenin Hills." 

289 by Stendha1: The ,book referred to is not by Stendhal but about him, 

by the Russian literary scholar A. K. Vinogradov. 

307 If they're not raking you in •••: This is a paraphrase of the original: 

"If they're not fucking you ..." 

310 Easter night: Presumably this refers to much the same scene as that 

described in Solzhenitsyn's story "The Easter Procession.'! 

317 Trntnev(!): The exclamation point underscores the fact that the 

name is derived from "truten," meaning "drone." 

332 (St. Luke, 11:50.): The Russian edition has SI. Luke, 11:51. 

333 (Matthew, 26:52): The Russian edition has Matthew 25:52. 

333 AIaIykin and Spiridonov-wby did they now sign •••: This line is 

missing from the Russian edition. 

334 his grandfather: Yevtushenko tells how his grandfather, who joined 

the Red Army, rose to the rank of Deputy Commander of Artillery 

of the Russian Republic, and was purged in 1938. (yevgeny Yevtushenko, 

A Precocious Autobiography, New York, Dutton, 1963, 

pp. 15-16.) 

338 My friend- Pauin: Panin is the real name of the individual who is 

described in The First Circle under the fictitious name Sologdin. 

353 seksoty: "Secret collaborator" is "sekretny sotrudnik"-hence seksot. 

357 "Bauderists": Followers of the Ukrainian .national leader Bandera. 

364 sharply: In the Russian edition this is misprinted as "rarely" 

("redko" instead of "rezko"). 

367 The Twentieth Congress: The Twentieth Congress of the Communist 

Party of the Soviet Union in February, 1956, at which Nikita 

Khrushchev launched his attack on Stalin's "personality cult."


Page 

370 To the New Shore: Vilis T. Latsis, K Novomu Beregu, published 

in 1951. Latsis was Prime Minister of Soviet Latvia. 

372 "residents": The term "resident" is used in Russian to indicate an 

important intelligence agent stationed in a nondiplomatic capacity on 

a long-term assign!llent in a foreign capital or country. 

378 "obstacle" detachments: "Obstacle" detachments were used during 

the war to prevent retreats. 

397 My Testimony: Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, translated by 

Michael Scammell, New York, Dutton, 1969. 

427 "besprizomikJ"': In the wake of the war, Revolution, Civil War, 

and famine all Russia was inundated with a swarm of children who 

had no homes or parents. They descended on Soviet cities and lived 

as best they could, by begging and stealing and cadging. They were 

christened the "besprizorniki" (sing.: "besprizornik")--the homeless 

children. 

428 The Road to Life: This Soviet motion picture attracted much attention 

in the West. It was based on the account of Anton S. 

Makarenko, Pedagogicheskaya Poema, and the film, one of the 

first Soviet sound films, was directed by N. Ekk and produced by 

Mezhrabpomfilm in 1931. . 

428 ask for it: See above note to page 307. 

431 (druzbina): These groups of volunteer deputy policemen were 

created by decree in 1959, and their authority was strengthened by 

a subsequent aecree of 1969. They operate "under the leaderspip 

and subject to the verification of Party organs:" 

441 one .and all: A Russian slang word for pickpocket-"shirmach" 

which comes from the thieves' language. In the Russian edition this 

is explained in a footnote, which has been omitted here as superfluous. 

476 on November 30, 1934: On December I, 1934, Kirov was assassinated 

in Leningrad, and Stalin set in motion the machinery of 

mass terror. 

495 Rastopchin's posted proclamations!: Count Fyodor Rastopchin was 

left behind as the governor of Moscow when Tsar Alexander I 

abandoned the city to Napoleon in 1812. 

495_.L. Gumilyev: The son of the poetess Anna Akhmatova and the 

executed poet Nikolai Gumilyev. 

496 Komi: The Komis are a small nationality in the northeast of 

European Russia. < 

505 " ••• suckers out!": The author's point here is that these expressions 

are incomprehensible to the non-native of the Archipelago, and the 

translator has tried to preserve this element of outlandishness in the 

renderings while giving at least something of the real content. For 

example, the first of the expressions given here, translated as "Skin 

the rag!," means literally "Take off your jacket!" (i.e., "so that I, 

a thief, can steal it!"). 

507 (cold): At this point there is a sentence in the Russian text which 

has been left untranslated beca1.l§e it is meaningless to anyone unfamiliar 

with the Russian alphabet: "We write, this word with the 

letter 'e' rather than the letter 'ye' in order to indicate the sound 

of a hard 'z.' " 


Page , " • 

509 "if they're not [beat]lng yon • • .": See above note to page 307. 

516 "struggle for life": This phrase is.in English in the Russian text. 

517 ttie OsCanIdno Musenm: The Ostankino Museum of Serf Arts, 

housed in what was once ,one of the estates of the noble Sheremetev 

. family in Moscow. 

528 in Russian: Iii Russian the phrase is "Prokuror-toporl" 

551 Lientenant Colonel Tsukanov: This is presumably the same individual 

who appears in The First Circle under the name Lieutenant 

Colonel Terentiev. " 

574 Khishclmk and Kfn'ashehnk: The name Khishchuk is derived from 

a Russian word meaning predatory, rapacious, greedy. The name 

KarllShchuk has a very menacing, sound to Russian ears, deriving 

from the juxtaposition of the root of "punish"· and the root of 

"pike"--a vicious fish. Both naines are presumably Ukrainian ~n 

origin. 

' 

587 Muter: The Russian word here is "Khozyain," with a capital "K." 

During Stalin's tUnes he was frequently.referred to as the "Khozyain." 

The word means variously owner, proprietor, master, boss, etc. It 

carries with it a connotation not only of power, but also of ownership 

. 

. 595 I Corinthians, 15:51: The translation given here is that of the KiJ;18 

James version of the Bible. A literal translation of the Russian text 

given by the author indicates a difference between the Russian and 

English versions of this famous verse: "I tell ')tou a truth: we shall 

not all die, but we $all all be changed." 

608 The First Glove: Pervaya' Perchatka, released by Mosfilm, 1946. 

Produce:F: A. Frolov; Director: B. Brozhkovsky. ' , 

634 Nadezhda Mandelstam: The author of Hope Against Hope, and 

widow of the purged poet Osip Mandelstam. 

641 Sofya Petroma: Published abroad in Russian: Lidiya Chukovskaya, 

Opustely Dom, Paris, Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1965; in 

English: Lydia Chukovskaya, The Deserted House. Translated by 

, Aline B. Werth, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1967. 

641 Rozlumsky: See The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I, pp. 48, 49.

Glossary 

Agranov, Yakov Savlovich (1-1939). Deputy People's Commissar 'of 

Intemal·Affairsunder Yagoda and Yezhov. Played role.inprepar~ 

ing $ow trials. Shot in purges. . 

Aksakov, Ivan Sergeyevich (1823-1886). Essayist and poet; graduate 

of. St.Petersburg Law School; leader of Slavophile school. 

Aldan-Semyonov, Andrei Ipatyevich (1908- ). Soviet writer; imprisoned 

in Far East camps, 1938-1953; author of memoirs. 

AIkmis (Astrov), Yakov -Ivanovich (1897-1938). Commander of 

Soviet air force after 1931; died in purges. 

A1ymov, seigel Yakovlevich (1892-1948). Soviet poet; wrote popular 

songs on patriotic themes. 

Arakc:heyev, Aleksei Andreyevich (1769-1834). Adviser to. Tsar 

Alexander I; known as a strict disciplinarian; fostered special military 

agriculiural colonies for army men. 

Aralov, Semyon Ivanovich (1880-1969). Bolshevik revolutionary; 

served as Soviet diplomat, 1921-1927; deputy director of State 

Literature Museum, 1938-1941. 

'ArIuzov, (Frauc:i'[1]) Artur Khristimovich (1891-1943). Secret police 

official, of Swiss Italian descent; head of counterintelligence; 

Aseyev, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1889-1963). Futurist poet, wrote in 

the style of MI!-yakovsky in spirit of revolutionary romanticism. 

BaIifsky, Vsevolod ApoUonovich (1892-1937). Ukrainian secret police 

chief, 1923-1930 and 1933-1937. 

Bandera, Stepan (1909-1959). Ukrainian nationalist; led anti-8oviet 

forces in Ukraine after World War II; assassinated in Munich. 

Bedny, Demyan (1883;...1945). Soviet poet. 

BeIiDkov, Arkady V. (1921-1970). Soviet writer; imprisoned in .1943 

. for his first novel; emigrated to Uilited States. 

.. 

680 I GLOSSARY 

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich (1811-1848). Literary critic and 

ardent liberal, champion of socially conscious, literature. 

Beloborodov, Aleksandr Georgiyevich (1891-1938). Bolshevik leader 

in the Urals; ordered execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family 

in 1918; expelled from Party as a Trotskyite; died in imprisonment. 

Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich (1899-1953). Georgian Bolshevik; headed 

secret police under Stalin after 1938; .executed after his death. 

Berman, Matvei (?-1938). One of the chiefs of Gulag; a Deputy 

Commissar of Internal Affairs, 193(j..;19.38 .. 

Benin, E. P. (1888-1939). Commander of Latvian Rifles, a pro 

Bolshevik military unit; secretary of Dzerzhinsky; chief of Dalstroi 

(Far East Camp Administration); arrested in 1937. 

Biryukov, Pavel Ivanovich (1860-1931). Writer and biographer of 

Lev Tolstoi; preached Tolstoyan nonresistance to evil; lived mostly 

abroad after 1898. 

Bliicher, Vasily Konstantinovich (1890-1938). Commander of Far 

East Military District, 1929-1938; shot in purge. 

Boky, Gleb Ivanovich (1879-1941). Secret police official; member of 

Supreme Court after 1927; arrested in 1937. 

Bosh (Gotlibovna), Yevgeniya Bogdanoma (1879-1925). Bolshevik 

Revolutionary; held Ukrainian Party posts, 1917-1918; sided with 

Trotskyites in 1923; suicide. 

Brnno, Giordano (1548-1600). Italian Renaissance philosopher. 

Bubnov, Andrei Sergeyevich (1883-1940). Old Bolshevik, historian; 

Central Committee secretary, 1925-1929; chief political commissar 

of army, 1924-1929; Education Commissar of R.S.F.S.R., 

purged. . 

Budenny, Semyon Mikhlll10vich (1883-1973). Civil War hero; commander 

of Bolshevik cavalry; headed Southwest Front in World 

War II. 

Bukovsky, Konstantin Ivanovich. Soviet journalist, essayist; father of 

the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. 

Campesino, EI. RevolUtionary name of Valentin y Gonzales, Spanish 

Civil War commander on Republican side; went to Soviet Union 

in 1939; spent time in camps; lIed to France in 1949. 

Chaadayev, Pyotr Yakovlevich (1794-1856). Russian philosopher; _ 

figured in dispute between pro-Westerners and Slavophiles; wrote 

critical analysis of Russian culture; declared insane. 

Chaikovsky, Nikolai Vasilyevich (1850-1926). Populist revolutionary; 

organized anti-Bolshevik coup in Archangel during Allied intervention 

of 1918-1919; lIed to Paris. 

Chaplygin, Sergei Alekseyevich (1869-1942). Specialist in theoretical 

mechanics and hydrodynamics; director of Higher Women's

Glossary I 681 

Courses, 1905-1918; member of Soviet Academy of Sciences after 

1929. 

Chemov, Viktor Mikhailovich (1876-1952). Socialist Revolutionary 

leader; served in Provisional Government; President of 1918 Constituent 

Assembly; went abroad in 1920. 

Chemyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828-1889). Russian writer and 

economist; advocated utopian socialism; spent time in prison and 

exile. 

Chudnovsky, Grigory Isaakovich (1894-1918). Bolshevik revolutionary; 

led storming of Winter Palace in Petrograd; killed on the 

Ukrainian front. 

Chukovskaya, Lidiya Komeyevila (1907- ). Soviet literary critic and 

writer (samizdat). 

DaI, Vladimir Ivanovich (1801-1872). Russian lexicographer. 

Demidovs. Dynasty of Urals industrialists under Peter the Great. 

Denikin, Anton Ivanovich (1872-1947). Tsarist military leader; commanded 

anti-Bolshevik forces iii South, 1918-1920; emigrated. 

Dimitrov, Georgi Mikhailovich (1882-1949). Bulgarian Communist 

leader; chief defendant in 1933 Reichstag trial in Leipzig. 

Dobrolyubov; Nikolai A1eksandrovich (1'836-1861). Russian literary 

critic, influenced by German materialist philosophy; favored social 

criticism m literature. 

Dombrovsky, Yuri (1910- ). Soviet writer; spent titne in camps; 

\Yfote about the Stalin period. 

Dyakov, Boris A1eksandrovich (1902- ). Soviet author of laborcamp 

memoirs. 

Dybenko, Pavel Yefimovich (1889-1938). Soviet military commander; 

headed Central Asian, Volga, Leningrad military districts. 

Dzerzhinsky, Fetiks Edmundovich (1,877-1926). First chief of the 

secret police; succeeded by Vyacheslav R. Menzhinsky. 

DZhaparidze, Lyusya. Daughter of Prokofi A. Dzhaparidze. 

,e~irapahzD Prokoli Aprasionovich (1880-1918). Azerbaijani revolutionary; 

member of Bolshevik government in Baku; among twentysix 

Baku commissars executed in 1918 at time of British intervention 

in Caucasus. 

Ehrenburg, flya Grigoryevich (1891-1967). Soviet writer and journalist; 

spent many years in Paris; author of memoirs. 

Eideman, Robert Petrovich (1895-1937). Soviet military commander; 

headed Frunze Military Academy, 1925-1932; chief of Osoaviakhim, 

the civil deefnse agency, after 1932. 

Eikhe, Robert Indrikovich (1890-1940). A founder of Latvian Communist 

Party; high Siberian official, 1925-1937; Soviet Agriculture 

Commissar, 1937-1938; arrested in purges. 


• Feldman, Boris MiroDovich (1890-1937). Soviet defense official; chief 

of Main Administration of Red Army, 1931-1937. 

Filipp. See Kolychev, Fyodor Stepanovich. 

Film, K. (FiDn.KbaIfiD, KODStaDtiD Yakovlevlch) (1904-1973). 

Soviet writer, playwright. 

Floreusky, Pavel A1eksandrovicb (1882-1943). Religious philosopher 

with broad scientific interests; anticipated development of cybernetics; 

died in camp. - 

Fonvizin, Deuis Ivanovicb (1744-1792). Russian satirist; wrote 

comedies about provincial nobility. 

Fnmze, Mikhail VasDyevich (1885-1925). Bolshevik Civil War commander; 

helped organize the Red Army; Defense Commissar in- 

1925; died after an operation. 

Fyodorov, Nikolai Fyodorovich (1828-1903). Russian religious 

philosopher; influenced Solovyev, Tolstoi, and Dostoyevsky. 

Fyodorova, Zoya A1ekseyevua (1912- ). Soviet movie actress; imprisoned 

after she had child by U.S. naval officer, Jackson R. Tate. 

G8IIDihal, Pavel Isakovich. Pushkin's uncle; sympathized with Decembrists; 

exiled in 1826 to Solvychegodsk, later to Solovetsky 

• Islands; freed in 1832. 

GavrDovich, Yevgeny Iosifovich (1899- ). Soviet screenwriter. 

Gekker, "Anatoly Dyich (1888-1938). Soviet military commander; 

military attache in China, 1922, and Turkey, 1929-1933; headed 

foreign relations department of General Staff, 1934-1937; executed 

in purges. 

German (1-1478). Russian Orthodox saint; founded Solovetsky monastery 

with Savvaty. 

Genhnni, Grigory Andreyevich (l87()!"1908). A founder and leader 

of Socialist Revolutionary Party. _ 

Gershnni, Vladimir Lvovicb (1930- ). Nephew of Grigory Ger 

- shuni; Soviet dissident, sentenced in 1949 to ten years as member of 

anti-Stalin- youth group; remanded to mental asylum in 1969. 

Gikalo, Nikolai Fyodorovich (1897-1938). Soviet Party official; 

served as Party secretary in B.elorussia, 1932-1937; purged. 

Ginzburg, Yevgeniya. Soviet writer; spent eighteen years in prison 

camps; memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind, appeared in West. 

GIezos, Manolis (1922- ).-Greek Communist leader; led resistance 

under German occupation; repeatedly jailed after the war. 

Glinka, MikhaiIIvanovicb (1804-1857). Russian composer; wrote 

first Russian national opera. 

_ 

Goloded, Nikolai Matveyevich (1894-1937). Soviet official; served as 

Premier of Belorussia after 1927; purged. 

Golyakov, Ivan Terentyevlch (1888-1961). Soviet jurist; -assisted


m Red Army purge, 1936-1938; chairman, Supreme Court, 1938- 

1949. 

Gorbatov, Aleksanclr VasByevich (1891-1973). Soviet military leader; 

sentenced to fifteen yea.rs in 1939, but freed two years later; commanded 

Third Army in 1943-1945, Soviet airborne forces in 

1950-1954 and Baltic Military District in 1954-1958. 

Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936). Writer; opposed Bolsheviks at first and 

lived abroad; returned to Russia in 1931; died under mysterious 

circumstances. 

GriD, Aleksanclr Stepanovich (1880-1932). Writer of romantic, fantastic 

adventure stories. 

Gumilyev, Lev Nikolayerich (1912- ). Soviet historian and ethnologist; 

at Leningrad University since 1961. 

Herzen, Aleksanclr Ivanovich (1812-1870). Liberal writer. 

Inber, Vera Mikhailovna (1890- ). Soviet writer; author of lyrical 

stories about Soviet themes and World War ll. 

Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich (1895-1963). Soviet writer, author 

of stories and plays about Civil War. 

Ivanov-Razumnik (Ivanov, Razumnik VasByevich) (1876-1946). Left 

Socialist Revolutionary; served in Tsarist and Soviet prisons; went 

to Germany in 1941. 

Ivanovsky (Ivanov), Nikolai Pavlovich (1893-1961); Soviet ballet 

dancer; director of Leningrad Choreographic School, 1940-1952. 

Jasienski, Bruno (1901-1941). Polish Communist writer; emigrated 

to Paris in 1925 and deported by France in 1929; moved to Soviet 

Union in 1931; arrested in purges of 1937. 

Johnson, Hewlett (1874-1966). British churchman; was chairman of 

a British-Soviet friendship society; backed Soviet causes. 

Kabalevsky, Dmitri Borisovich (1904- ). Prominent Soviet composer. 

Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich (1893- ). Close associate of Stalin; 

headed SQviet railroad system. Ousted from leadership in 1957. 

KaktyD, Artur Martynovich (Kaktins, Arturs) (1893-1937). Latvian 

revolutionary; held Soviet economic posts;- Deputy Premier of Tadzhik 

Republic after 1934; purged. 

Ka6nin, MikhaIl Ivanovich (1875-1946). Nominal President of the 

Soviet- Union, 1919-1946. 

Kalyanov, V. I. Soviet Sanskrit scholar and Buddhologist. 

Kapitsa, Pyotr Leonidovich (1894- ). Soviet physicist; emigrated to 

Britain in 1921; returned to Soviet Union in 1935; became Director 

of Institute of Physics; worked on atomic bomb. 

Kaplan, Fanya (Dora) (1888-1918). Left Socialist Revolutionary; 

executed after unsuccessful attempt on Lenin's life. 


Katayev, Valendn Petrovich (1897- ). Soviet novelist aud. playwright; 

won prominence in Soviet literature . 

. KIrov, Sergei MIronovieh (1886-1934). CloSe Stalin associate; his 

. murder, reputedly inspired by Stalin, se~ off the purges. 

KoIdIak; A1eksaDdr VuDyevleh (1873-1920). Tsarist admiral; led 

anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, 191B-1920; executed. 

Koblyshevsky, Pyotr (1690-1803). Last hetman. of Zaporozbye 

Cossacks; exiled in 1775 to Solovetsky monastery f!)r twenty-five 

years. 

Kolyebev (FIJipp), Fyoclor Stepanovieb (1507-1569). Russian Orthodox'Metropolitan 

of Moscow; a foe of Ivan the Terrible;. exiled 

to Solovetsky monastery; executed by Malyuta Skuratov; canonized 

•. 

Kopelev, Lev Ziaovyevieb (1912- ). Soviet specialist in German 

literature. - , 

. Kort, Avgust lvanovieh (1887-1937). Soviet military leader; commander 

of Moscow Military District, 1929-1935, and Frunze 

Academy, 1935-1937. . 

Kornilov, Law


Krylov, 1V8D Andreyevieh (1769-1844). Russian cla:ssical fabulist. 

KrzhizIumovsky, Gleb Mak'imillanovieh (1872-1959). Russian power 

engineer; drafted Russia's first electrification plan; headed State 

Planning Commission, 1921-1930. 

KUD, Bela (1886-1939). Hungarian Communist leader; headed shortlived 

Hungarian Soviet ,RepubliC" in 1919;, then sought refuge in 

Soviet Union; died in purges. 

KureIiatov, Igor Vasilyevieh (1902-1968). Soviet physicist; headed 

development of atomic and hydrogen bombs. 

Kurganov, I. A. Russian emigre statistician. 

KUnky, DmitrI lV8Dovieh (1874-1932). Bolshevik revolutionary; 

"served as People's Commissar of Justice, 1918-1928. , 

Kutyakov, Ivan Semyonovieh (1897-1942). Soviet military leader; 

", deputy commander, Volga Military District, 1936-1937. 

Lakshin, Vladimir Yakovlevieh (1933- 

). Soviet literary critic; wrote 

about Solzbenitsyn in the h"beral monthly Novy Mir: 

Landau, Lev Davidovich (1908-1968). Soviet physicist; won 

Nobel Prize in 1962; incapacitated in near-fatal auto accident in 

1962. 

Lapin, Boris,Matveyevich (1905-1941). Soviet writer; 'wrote in col 

'laboration with Zakhari Khatsrevin; killed while a war correspondent. 

La'" Martjn lV8Dovich (1888-1941). Early Cheka official, 1917- 

, '1921; director, Plekhanov Economies Institute. 1932-1937; arrested. 

LatsIs; Vilis (1904-1966). Latvian Communist novelist; served as 

Premier of Soviet Latvia, 1940-1959. 

Leonov, Leonid Makslmovich (1899- ). Soviet novelist; favored 

psychological and social novels in 1920's. 

Leskov, Nikolai Semyonovieh (1831-1895). Russian realist writer; 

known for social f1avol: of his stories; a master of style. 

Levin, Lev Grigoryevich (1870-1938). Soviet physician; headed 

Therapy Department in Kremlin Hospital; accused in 1938 of 

causing death of Soviet officials; sentenced to death. 

Llkhaehev, Dmitri Sergeyevieh (1906- ). Soviet cultural historian; 

specialist in ancient Russian literature. 

Lomov-Oppokov, Georgllppolitovich (1888-1938). Soviet economic 

official; headed Russian oil industry and Donets coal basin in 

1920's; later in State Planning Commission and Soviet Control 

, Commission; died in prison. 

MacDonald, James Ramsay (1866-1937). British statesman; served as 

Laboorite Prime Minister in 1924 and 1929-1935; established 

relations with Soviet Union in 1929. 


MakareDko, Anton Semyonovicb (1888-1939). Educator; organized 

rehabilitation colonies for juvenile delinquents. 

_ MaIenkov, Georgi MaksimDianovicb. (1902- ). Close associate of 

Stalin; after his death briefly Soviet Party leader, then Premier until 

1955; expelled from leadership by Khrushchev in 1957. 

MBDDerheim, Carl GusCaf (1867-1951). Finnish general and statesman; 

commanded Finnish forces in World War II; President, 1944- 

1946. 

Marchenko, Anatoly Tikhonovicb (1938- ). Soviet dissident; wrote 

abOut imprisonment, 1960-1966, in My Testimony, published in 

West; served a second term, 1968-1971. 

Mayakovsky, Vladimir V1adimirovicb


OrdzhoDikidze, Grigory Konstantino.vicb (1886-1937). Close associate 

of Stalin; headed heavy industry; a suicide during purges. 

Palcbinsky, Pyotr Akimovicb (1878-1929). Economist and mining 

engineer; chief defendant in Shakhty trial of 1928; shot. . , 

Palitsyil, Avraami (Averki Ivanovieb) (1-1626). RlJssian nobleman 

under Ivan the Terrible; in disfavor after 1588; exiled to Solovetsky 

monastery, where he became a monk. 

Papanin, Ivan Dmitriyevieb (1894- ). Soviet Arctic explorer; headed 

first ice-floe station, 1937-1938. 

Pechkovsky, Nikolai Konstantinovicb (1896- ). Soviet opera singer; 

popular in 1920's and 1930's. 

Pellico, Silvio (1789-1854). Italian writer and patriot. 

Peter the Great (1672-1725). Tsar of Russia, 1682-1725. 

Peters, Yakov Kbristoforovicb (1886-1942). Secret police official; 

deputy chief of OGPU, 1925-1930. 

,aroylte~ Simon VasDyevich (1879-:-1926). Ukrainian nationalist 

leader, 1918-1920; assassinated in Paris. 

Petrovsky, Grigory Ivanovicb (1878-1958). Bolshevik revolutionary; 

President of Ukraine, 1919-1939; purged in 1939 and became 

deputy director. of Museum of the RevollJtion in Moscow. 

Pigulevskaya, Nina Viktorovna (1894- ). Soviet Orientalist. 

Pisarev, Dmitri Ivanovieb (1840-1868). Russian literary critic; influenced 

by German natural materialism. 

Plekbanov, Georgi Valentinovich (1856-1918). Marxist philosopher 

and historian; became Menshevik leader and opposed Bolsheviks. 

Pletnev, Dmitri Dmitriyevich (1872-1953). Soviet physician; sentenced:to 

twenty-five years after 1938 show trial. 

Pobozhi, Aleksandr. A Soviet railroad construction engineer. 

Pogodin (Stukalov), Nikolai Fyodorovich (1900-1962). Soviet playwright; 

wrote plays about Lenin and White Sea Canal. 

Popov, Blagoi (1902-7). Bulgarian Communist; a defendant in 1933 

Reichstag trial; exiled to Soviet Union; disappeared in purges ..- 

Postyshev, Pavel Petrovich (1887-1940). Ukrainian Bolshevik leader; 

arrested in 1938; died in prison. 

Primakov, Vitaly Markovich (1897-1937). Soviet military commander; 

led pro-Bolshevik Cossacks in Civil War. 

Priselkov, Mikhail Dmitriyevich (1881-1941). Soviet historian; 

studied ancient Russian chronicles. 

Prisbvin, Mikhail MikhBilovich (1873-1954). Russian writer; author 

of stories about environment and animal life. 

Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich (1891-1953). Soviet composer. 

Prugavin, Aleksandr Stepanovich (1850-1920). Russian PopUlist 

author; wrote about Old Believers and other sects. 


Pushldn, Aleksandr Sergeyevieh (1799-1837). Russian classical poet. 

PutDa, Vitovt Kazimirovieh (1893-1937). Soviet military commander; 

military attach6 in Japan, Finland, Germany, Britain. 

Pyiltakov, Georgi LeoDidovieh' (1890-1937). Bolshevik official; held 

high financial and industrial. posts; executed. 

Repetto (Ji:lvira TriSoIiDi). Italian coloratura soprano; sang wiQ1 Italian 

opera in St. Petersburg, 1885-1887. . 

Rudzutak, Yan Emestovieh (1887-1938). Associate of Stalin; arrested 

in 1937 purge; died in prison. 

RusIanova, Lidiya Andreyema (1900- ). Russian folk singer. 

Rykov, Aleksei IVlinovieh·(1881-1938). Close associate of Stalin; 

Soviet Premier, 1924-1930; shot after 1938 show trial. 

SabliD, Yuri VIadimIrovieh (1897-1937). ~viet military commander. 

Saltyehikha (SaItykova, Dlirya Nikolayema) (1730-1801). Woman 

landowner in Moscow Province; noted for cruel treatment of serfs. 

Savvaty (1-1435). Russian Orthodox saint; founded, with German, 

the Solovetsky monastery in 1429. 

Selviusky, Dya (Karl) Lvovieh (1899-1968). Soviet writer; led constructivist 

school in 1920's. 

, Serafunovieh (popov), Aleksandr Serafimovieh (1863-1949). Soviet 

writer; classical author of proletarian, revolutionary prose. 

Serebryakova, GaUna losifoma (1905- ). Soviet writer; author of' 

prison-camp memoirs. . 

ShagiDyan, Marietta SergeyevilB (1888- ). Soviet writer; author of 

detective stories and a novel on industrialization theme. 

Shalamov, Variam Tikhonovieh (1907- ). Soviet writer; spent 

seventeen years in Kolyma camps; author of Kolyma Stories (Paris, 

1969). 

Sheherbatsky, Fyodor IppoUtovieh (1866-1942). Buddhologist. 

Sheiuia, Lev Romanovieh (1906-1967). Soviet prosecuting and investigatory 

official; wrote spy stories after ]..950. 

Shekhter, Boris SemyoDovieh (1900-1961). Soviet composer. 

Shereshevsky, Nikolai Adolfovieh (1885-1961). Soviet physician; witness 

in 1938 purge trial; accused in ~'doctors' plot," 1952-1953. 

Shevehenko, Taras GrIgoiyevieh (1814-1861). Ukrainian classical 

poet; exiled for pOlitical activities, 1847-1857. . 

Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovieh (1893- ). Soviet writer and memoirist; 

founded formalistic school. 

ShUkhter,' Aleksandr Grigoryevieh (1868-1940). Bolshevik revolutionary; 

agricultural economist; Ukrainian Commissar of Agriculture, 

1927-1929; then director of Ukrainian Institute of 

Marxism-Leninism. . 

Shostakovieh, DmItri Dmitriyevieh (1906-1975). Soviet composer.


Sikorski, W1adyslaw (1881-1943). Military leader of Polish exiles. 

Skuratov, Malyuta (Belsky, Grigory Lukyanovich (?-1572). Aide of 

Ivan the Terrible; headed the Oprichnina, a policelike group. 

Slutsky, Boris Abramovich (1919:'" ). Soviet poet and translator: 

Smimov, Ivan Nlkitovich (1881-1936). People's Commissar for Communications, 

1923-1927; expelled from Party; shot after trial. 

SofroDitsky, Vladimir VIadimirovich (1901- ). Soviet pianist. 

Solovyev, Vladimir Sergeyevich (1853-1900). Religious philosopher; 

sought synthesis of Orthodox faith and Western thought. 

Solts, Aron Aleksandrovich (1872-1945). Soviet judicial and prosecuting 

official; member of Party's Central Control Commission; 

removed from all posts in 1938. 

Spiridonova, Marlya AIeksandrovua (1884-1941). Russian revolutionary; 

condemned to hard labor in 1906 after assassination of a 

Tsarist official; leader of Left Socialist Revolutionaries after February, 

1917; sentenced to year in jail in late 1918; amnestied; quit 

politics. 

Starokadomsky, Mikhail Leonidovieh (1901-1954). Soviet composer. 

Steklov, Yuri Mikhailovieh(1873-1941}. Soviet historian; edited the 

newspaper lzvestiya in 1920's; purged. 

Stuchka (Stocks), Pyotr Ivanovieh (1865-1932). 'Latvian Belshevik; 

headed short-lived Latvian Soviet Government, 1918-1919; served 

as chairman of Soviet Supreme Court, 1923-1932. 

Tanev, Vasil (1898-7). Bulgarian Communist; a defendant in 1933 

Reichstag trial; exiled to Soviet Union; disappeared in purges. 

Tendryakov, Vladimir Fyodorovich (1923- ). Soviet author; writes 

psychological stories on moral and social conllicts. 

Tess (Sosyura), Tatyana Nikolayevua (1906- ). Soviet journalist. 

Tikhon, Patriarch (1865-1925). Head of Russian Orthodox Church 

after 1917; detained 1922-1923 on oppositionist charges. 

Tikhonov, Aleksandr Nikolayevich (1880-1956). Soviet writer; was 

associated with Gorky; headed publishing houses after 1917 Revolution. 

," 

'fimofeyev-Ressovsky, Nikolai, Vladimirovieh (1900- ). Soviet 

geneticist; worked in Germany, 1924-1945; sent to prison camp 

on return to Soviet Union; rehabilitated under Khrushchev. 

Todonky, AIeksandr Ivanovich (1894-1965). Soviet military commander; 

headed Air Force Academy, 1934-1936; in prison camps, 

1938-1953. 

Tolstoi, AIeksei Nikolayevich (1882-1945). Soviet writer of psychological 

realistic school; emigrated after Revolution and returned in 

, 1922; wrote major historical novels. , 

Trotsky, Lev Davidovich (1879-1940). Associate of Lenin; first 


Soviet Defense Commissar; deported by Stalin: slain in Mexico 

City. 

Tsiolkovsky, Konsfantin EcIaardovich (1857-1935). Russian inventor; 

laid groundwork for space travel. ' 

Tukhachevsky, MikhaIl Nlkolayevieh (1893-1937). Soviet military 

leader; shot in 1937

,- - 


Voroshilov, Klhnut YefremCK'ich (1881-1969). Oose associate of 

Stalin; long Defense Commissar; 89viet President, 1953-1960. 

VyshlDsky, Aadrei Yanuaryevida (1883-1954). Lawyer and diplomat; 

chief prosecutor in show trials, 1936-1938; Foreign Minister, 

1949-1953. 

Yagoda, Genrikh Grigoryevich (1891-1938). Secret police official; 

People's Cominissar of Internal Affairs, 1934-1936; executed. 

Yakir, 10Da Emmanoilovich (1896-1937). Soviet military C9mmander; 

headed Kiev Military District, 1935-1937; purged. . 

Yakubovidl, Pyotr FiUppovich (1860-1911). Russian poet; translator 

of Baudelaire; wrote memoirs about his Tsarist exile. '. 

Yegorov, Aleksandr Dyieh (1883-1939). Soviet military commander; 

military attacheS in China, 1925-1926; headed Belorussian Military 

,tcirtsi~ 1927~1931; chief of General Staff, 1931-1937. . 

Yuukidze, Avel Safronovich (1877-1937). Bolshevik: official; secre 

. tary of Central Executive Committee, 1918-:-1935; shot in purges. 

'Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895-1939). Secret police official; People's 

Commissar of Internal Affairs, 1936-1938. 

Zaozersky, Aleksandr Ivanovieh (1814-1941). Russian historian. 

ZavuyagiD, Avnami Pavlovich (1901-1956). Soviet metallurgical executive; 

headed Magnitogorsk steel plant, 1933-1937; Norilsk 

copper-nickel complex (after 1938), and nuclear weapons program, 

1953-1956. 

Zelinsky, Kome6 Lyutsianovieh (1896-1970). Soviet literary critic; 

a founder of constructivist school. 

Zhuk, Sergei Yakovlevieh (1892-1957). Soviet hydraulic engineer; 

supervised canal projects built with forced labor. 

Zhukov, Geoqp (Yun") Aleksandrovlcia (l'908- ). Soviet journalist; 

headed State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 

1957-1962; then PravdiJ commentator. 

Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), GrigOry YeVseyevich (1883-1936). Associate 

of Lenin; expelled from Party in 1927; shot after 1936 show trial. 

ZosheheDko, Mikhail Mikhailovieh (1895-1958). Soviet satirist; 

known for his comic novellas; often in disfavor. 

Zosima (1-1478). Russian Orthodox saint; first abbot of Solovetsky 

monastery. 

~ .. ' .

" 

Index 

. \ 

Page numbers· in boldface refer to the Glossary 

Abrosimov, 396 

Adak, 390 

Aglanov, Nikolai A., 129 

Agranov, Yakov S., 333, 679 

agricultural labot colonies: Arakcheyev, 

154, 675ft, 679 , , 

selkhozy, 16, 21, 74-75, 138, 199, 

23"6-37 .. 594 

Ahtme, 54a-49 

Akatui, 76n, 200, 203~, 205n, 222 

Akimov, Nikolai, 176, 177, 181 

AksakoVi Ivan S., 441i, 679 

A1afuzo, 333 

A1a1ykin, 333 , 

A1c1an-Semyonov, Andrei I., 325, 345. 

346, 348, 679 

"Baa-Relief on the C1ilf," 426 

A1f1ksandrov, 554. . 

A1ekseyentsev, 433 

Alekseyev, 571 

Alexander m. Tsar, 316 

Aliyevi 389/1. 

AIkanis (Astrov), Yakov I., 333, 679 

All-Russian Central Executive Committee 

(VTsIK). 12-13. 15. 23, 

75,122-23,124n,449,539 

Alymov. Sergei Y., 73, 679 

amnesty: faith in, 187, 523 

(1945), 136, 187-91 passim, 620, 

670 

(1953; "Voroshi!ovAmnesty"), 431 

Anarchists, 12-13, 312, 313 

Andreyev; 416 

· Andreyev. G., 68 

Andreyevich, Mikhail, 320 

Andronnikov, 19 

Angren.565 

Anichkov, I. Y., 44ft 

· Anichk.ova, Natal'y& M •• 263. 634 

Anikanov, Ywi, 116-17 

Anikin, 412 

Anisimov, 129 

Annenkova. Yuliya. 334 

Annushka, 129 

Antonov. 535, 5S9 ' 

Antsiferov. N. P., 44ft 

Apeter, I., 122ft, 468-69, 535 

Arala:heyev, Aleksei A., 675n. 679 

Arakcheyev (semimilitary settlements), 

154,675n,679 

Aralo,v, Semynn I .. 345, 67!J 

Aramovich, 599 

Archangel: prison, 475 

Arenshtam. 333 

.y~vehsistrA 431 

Artuzov (Frauci [1D, Artur K.. 333, 

· 679 

Aseyev, Nikolai N., 119, 679 

Askoldov, S. A., 44ft 

Assotsiani-Erisov, 44n 

Averbakh, I. L.: penal theory, 22ft. 

68, 81. 103, 104, lOS. l11n. 113n, 

liS. 117, 119n, 305, 306, 41-5, 

434, 435, 438, 475n. 582ft, 

674ft 

694 INDEX 

Babich, Aleksandr P., 215, 216, 

295-96, 379-80, 381, 645, 653 

Bagratuni, 4411, 64 

B,iikal·Amut Main line Railroad see 

BAM 

Bakayev, 487 

Bakhrushin, N. M., 44n 

Bakst, Misha, 316-17 

Balitsky, Vsevolod A., 333\ 679 

Balkhash, 138, 56S 

Baltic States: persecution and arrests, 

371, 373, 438, 640 

set! also Lithuanians 

Balyberdin, AnIOn V., 386 

BAM (Baikal-Amur Main Line Railroad), 

80, 140, 235, 592 

BAMlag, 80, 138, 142, 540, ,543, 546 

Manzovka, 325-26 

Bandera, Stepan. 67611, 679 

"Banderists," 357n, 411, 412, 676n 

Barabanov, 549 

Baranov, 397 

Barinov, 178, 179, 182 

Barinov, 350 

Barkalov, 129 

Basmachi, 52, 88 

Bayangol, 423 

Bedny, Demyan, 525n, 679 

BelBaltJag, 72, 98 

Medvezll¥egorsk, 72, 98; 100, 444, 

599 

Belenky, 250 

Belinkov, Arkady V., 185n, 315-16, 

488,679 

A ROllgh Draft of ·Feelings. 315 

Belinsky, Vissarion G •• 302, 680 

Beloborodov, Aleksandr G .• 32, 333, 

680 

Belomor Canal see White Sea-Baltic 

canal 

Belov, Viktpr A. ("Emperor Miklail~'), 

154 

Belsky. 547 

Belyayev, Aleksandr I •• 268-74 

passim, 277; 281, 282. 283, 286 

_Benediktova, Galya, 464 

Beregovaya. 437-38 

Berezniki. 73, 93. 98. 555, 592 

Beria. Lavrenti P .• 181. 344, 535. 

538. 550. 680 

Berman, Matvei. 84.96. 99, 674n, 

532,680 

Bemshtein, Ans, 216, 262, 600-01 

Bemshtein, Besschastnaya, 295 

Bemshtein, Gesel, 295 

Bershader, Isaak, 232, 288' 

Beryozina, Lyuba, '250 

Berzin. E. P., 128, 333, 680 

Beskudnikovo, 487, 497 

besprizomiki, 427-28, 447, 677n 

Bezrodny, Vyacheslav, 398 

Bilderling, 659 

Biryukov, Pavel I., 680 

Co.lIYt!rsations with Totsloi, 211 

"bitches" ("half-breeds"), 126, 190, 

'347,359, 422, 428, 437, 438, 530 

blatnye see thieves 

Blestin, 302 

Blokhin, Sasha, 450 

BlUcher, Vasily K., 332, 639, 680 

Boky, Gleb I., 34n, 40, 313, 680 

Bolsheviks, 12, 13, 154, 332 

Bonch-Bruyevich, Vladimir D., 17 

Borisov, Avenir, 323-24 

Borodin, A. B., 44n 

Boronyuk, Pavel, 158, 599 

Bosh (Gotlibovna), Yevgeniya B., 17, 

144,680 . 

Boyarchikov, Aleksandr, 319 

Bratchikov, A. S., 525 

- .Bratsk, 565 

Bmz, 44n 

Breslavskaya, Anechka, 501 

Brodsky, 99 

Bubnov, Andrei S., 33, 680 

Budenny, Serityon M., 404n, 680 

building and construction projects, 

591-93 

canals, 78, 80-89, 91-92, 1~.-591; 

Volga-Don Canal, 88, S91; see 

also Moscow-Volga Canal; White 

Sea-Baltic Canal (Delomor) 

.repair work in cities, 16, 19-20 

roads, 55-56, 72, 592 

see also individual sites and 

projectS; railroads 

Bukhonin, 386 

Bukhaltsev, 140 

Bukharin, Yura, 465 

Bukovsky, Konstantin I., 35211, 680 

Burepolom, 199, 206, 221, 262, 381, 

386, 396, 545-46, 547, 599 

Burov, 129 

Burshtein, 288 

Buryat-Mongolia, 138, 379, 593; 

see also Dzhida 

Buslov, 570, 571-72 

Bulenko, Musa, 241 

Butyrki, 4811n 

Solzhenitsyn in, 227, 501 

Bykov, Pavel, 223 

El Campesino (Valentin y Gonzales), 

186, 680 

camps (Corrective Labor Camps), 

73-74, 103, 144, 145, 673n

~maC (continued) 

chief administrations: GlavLeslag, 

140; GlavPromstroi, 140; 

GUITL, 23, 24; GULGMP, 140; 

GULZbDS, 139-40, 141, 241; 

GUMZ/GUMZak, 22, 23, 123; 

GUPR, 22; \1SVidag,'128 

chiefs, 48, 49, 160, 202, 255, 503, 

513, 534-55, 566, -S87; and 

Communist prisoners, 344-48 

passim, 350, 351; prisoners as 

servants, 147, 149-50,543, 

544-45; serf owners compared 

with, ISO, 1S3, 540, 541, 544-45, 

546; and truSties, 253, 261, 

262-63,264, 348, 418; see also 

individual sections below 

creation of and early history, 14, 

1.5-,16, 17,20-21 

Cultural and Educational Section 

(KVCh), 48, 67, 93, 118, 125, 

190, 252, 348, 468-501, 544; 

instruction for prisoners,' 106, 

122, 434, 436, 453-54, 46[;, 469, 

470-71,476-77,492;sewspapers 

and magazines, 118, 475; 

theatricals and entertainments, 

20 .. 39-40 .. 44, 105n, 120,247, 

471, 477. 491-501 

economic justification for, 71, 72, 

142-43, 578-94 

investigating commissions. 60, 

63-64, 124n-125n, 255, 387, 662 

Medical Section, 48, 215-18, 

241-42. 2,43. 247; trusties, 215, 

252, 264, ~6, 348 

monasteries and nunneries used as, 

19.74 

personnel. 15, 538, 554-63, 578; 

free employees (volnyashki), 

51, 53, 237, 262, 459, 539, 

566-73. 584; thievery by stalf, 

159, 555. 568, 5841 see also chiefs 

above; guards; jailers camp; 

trusties 

political and social justification for, 

142, 143-45, 578 

prison, 136, 383, 384; Penalty 

Isolator (ShIzo), 36, 38, 78, 127, 

136, 150, 21S, 347, 376, 414, 

415-16 ' 

Production Section, 48, 74: principle 

of "rubber," 166,511, 512; 

tukhta/tufta, 69; 95, 158, 

160-67 passim, 571, 572: see also 

building and construction 

projects; logging projects: mining 

prostitutes, 67, 575-76 

INDBX 695 

ReI=Ords and Oassiflcation Section 

(URCh), 74; 130, 132, 376 

Rest Point (OP). 218-19. 220, 263 

Security Operations Section, 74, 

125, 114, 378-79, 381, 382, 475, 

477, 538; chiefI"godfather" /kum, 

224, 264, -348, 351-52, 358n, 

359, 372, 373, 484, 533; in early 

years, 29, 48, 49: interrogation 

and courts, 249, 383, 384, 

385-86, 475; resentlmcing, 

375-77, 380-83, 398: and stool 

pigeons, 351-52, 353, 358, 359, 

372,373 

self-government and supervision by 

prisoners: in early years, 11, 

44-49 passim, 68-69, 70. 116-19, 

122; see also trusties 

settlements near, 564-76 

sexes segregated, 152-53. 246-49, 

508 

Special Camps (OsobIagi), 317, 

560,.627-28 

Special Purpose Camps (SLON), 

18-20, 72-73, 674ft 

see also dogs (police dogs); horses; 

prisoners: World War IT. camps: 

individual camps 

camps, concentration, 17-18, 19-20, 

537' 

camps, Tsarist see Tsarist regime, 

prisons and camps .. 

canal construction, 123, 591 

Volga-Don Canal, 88, 591 

see also Moscow-Volgl Canal; 

White Sea-Baltic Canal 

(Belomor) 

cannibalism, 398, 424 , 

Central Bureau of Dactyloscopic 

Registration, 23 

Central Council of Trade Unions 

(VTaSPS), 123 

Cervlintes, 491n 

Chaadayev. Pyotr y" 213, 680 

Chaikovsky, Nikolai V., 18n, 680 

Chaplygin, Sergei A., 680-81 

Chavchavadze, Olga, 654 

Chavdarov, 435 

Chebotaryeva, Yelena, P., 234, 403, 

405, 406, 408 

Chebotaryov, Gennady, 403. 409 

Chebotaryov, Sergei A., 215, 403-09, 

465 

Chebotaryov, Viktor, 403, 408-09 

Chechev, 222, 549 . 

Cheka, 18, Z2, 23, 304, 353, 538 

camp personnel, 23, 43, 46. 142, 

538, 553: see also guards 

696 INDEX 

Chekhov, Anton P., 205n, 391 

on hard labor and Sakhalin, 78, 

204,524,540,621,628,630,651 

"In Exile," 523 

''The Man in the Case," 274 

Chelyabinsk-40, 407, 593 

Chepig.549 

Chernov. Viktor M .• 299, 681 

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai G .• 302. 681 

children and juveniles. 447-67 

arrests and imprisonment, 154. 295. 

448-49. 452, 453.456: children's 

colonies. 420. 428, 452; clothing. 

35. 61, 67. 459: "death-row 

prisoners," 450-51: escapes. 67. 

- 455; 1920's and 1930's, 21, 447, 

45Q; sexual abuse. 422, 451; 

sexual activity. 233, 455-56; 

Stalin and increased stringency 

of laws. 448-49,463 

, ·arrests of parents, 464-67, 641: 

camp births. 67. 238, 241-47 

passim: see also besprizorniki 

below 

besprlzorniki, 427-28, 447, 677n 

see also family and relatives (of 

prisoner); Kornsomol; Pioneers; 

students 

China (People's Republic). 118. 246. 

640 

Chinese Eastern Railroad (KVZhD). 

403,406 

"chirp," 103. 120,436,469 

Chizhevsky, Aleksandr L, 482 

Chmil, Dusya, 624 , 

Chorny, 559 

ChS see family and relatives (of 

prisoner) 

Chudakov, 298- 

Chudnovsky, Grigory I., 333, 681 

Chukovskaya, Lidiya K., 495n, 496n, 

641, 678n, 681 

Chulpenyov, Pavel, 258-59, 552, I 

621.,.22, 647 

Chupin, Avtonom V., 403-04: see also 

Chebotaryov, Sergei A. 

Civil War, 19, 20-21, 88, 427 

coal mining, 1,99, 203, 580, 593; see 

also mining 

Code of Criminal Procedure: Form 

206,602 

Codes, 144: see also Code of Criminal 

Procedure; Corrective Labor 

Code;-Criminal Code 

Communist Manifesto, 256, 302n 

construction projects ·see building and 

construction projects 

Communist Party: arrests and 

imprisonment of members. 134, 

180, 209, 264, 315, 322-52, 

367: (1937) 328, 331-35 

passim 

Central Committee, 332 

Eighth Congress. 14, 104. 144 

expulsion from,'1S33n 

Twentieth Congress, 367, 676n 

,concentration camps, 17-18, 19-20, 

537 

Congress of the Soviets, 12-13, 14, 

577 

Corrective Labor Code (1924), 22, 

145, 414, 581 

Article 49, 146 

Corrective Labor Code (1933), 123, 

414,41S 



Council of People's Commissars. 13, 

23, 71-72, 75, 106, 140, 238, 

449,539 

Criminal Code (l 926), 144 



Article 58, 293-303, 463: Section 

I, 298: Section 4, 298: Section 7, 

298; Section 8, 293: Section 10, 

220, 280, 294, 297, 298: Section 

11, 280: Section 12, 298: Section 

14, 394. 417, 420 





Dal, Vladimir I .• 358n. 512. 532, 681 

Dalstroi. 128, 498 

Danielyan. Mariya, 328 

Danzas, Y. N .• 44n 

Davidenkov, N., 494-95, 495n-496n 

Debin goldfields. 397 

decrees see laws and judiciary. decrees 

Dedkov, 345 

Degtyaryov, 38, 64 

Degtyaryov, 38n, 64 

Delvig, I. S., 44n 

Demidov dynasty, 608, 681 

"Democratic Party," 315 

Denikin, Anton I., 104, 681 

denunciations see stool pigeons 

detsisty ("democratic centralists"), 

387 

Didorenko, 549 

Dimitrov, Georgi M., 345n, 638, 681 

Dmitlag, 84n, 109n, 113, 116, 117-18, 

120n, 415, 437-38, 475, 546; see 

also MOSCOW-Volga Canal;

INDEX 697 

698 INDEX 

Dmitlag (continued) 


(Belomor) 

Dneprostroi, 87 

Dobrolyubov, Nikolai A., 657, 661, 

681 

Dobryak, Ivan, 202 

dogs (pets), 430ft, 459, 559 

dogs (POlice dogs), 23, 123, 127, 179n, 

396, 397, 398, 399, 423, 534 

Dolinka, 209-10, 382ft 

Konspai, 420 

Dombrovsky, Yuri, 207, 681 

Oonbas, 74, 565 

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M., 205n, 604 

on bard labor (incl. The House 0/ 

tire Dead), 200, 203, 217n, 307, 

491n, 526, 599, 605, 628, 630, 

651 

Dovatur, Aristid I., 485-86 

druzhina, 431, 677n 

Dubrovlag, 662" " 

Dudinka, 565, 592 

Dukcha, 129 

Dukelsky,54O 

"Durovoi," Vasily, 549 

Dyakov, Boris A., 325, 337, 344, 345, 

346, 350, 351-52, 553, 681 

"Memoirs of a Trusty" (Memoirs 

" 0/ Survival), 257, 348-49, 675n 

Dybenko, Pavel Y., 333, 681 

Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Eo, 22, 23, 337, 

537, 538, 681 

Dzhantui, 421-22 

Dzhaparidze, Lyusya, 347, 681 

Ozhaparidze, Prokofl A., 681 - 

Dzhezkazgan, 138, 565, 580, 593, 621 

Dzhida, 215, 358, 379-80 

Bayangol, 423 

economy and economic planning: 

camps, justification for, 71, 72, 

142-43, 578-94 

Five-Year Plans: First, 55, 71: 

Second, 121-22, 124ft 

Ne"., Economic Policy (NEP), 23, 

43,427 

Ehrenburg, Dya G~ 300-01, 485, 642, 

681 

Eiehmans, 31, 53, 65, 76, 84ft 

Eideman, Robert P., 333, 681 

Eikhe, Robert I., 347, 681 

Ekibastuz, 412, 417, 418, 545, 557, 

574 

Solzhenitsyn in, 625-26, 671 

Eljlell, 134, 398 

Mylga, 126, 128, 130 

Engels,. Friedrich,' 9, 143, 256, 302ft 

engineers and technicians, 289, 583 

Qrrests and imprisonment, 72, 182, 

305-06, 312: as trusties, 254, 

255,264 

see also building and construction 

projects 

Enseld; 299 

Epshtein, Faina Y., 299--300 

Esperantists,88,102 

ethnic groups see nationalities and 

ethnic groups " 

exile and resettfement, 76, 96, 138, 

144, 154, 371, 373, 405n, 593, 

633 

Fadayev, A.: The Young GUQl'd, a 

Novel, 262n, 676n 

Falike, Tatyana, 6~6 

family and "relatives (of prisoner 

[CbS)), 292, 635, 638-40, 641, 

647-48, 651-55 

arrests and imprisonment, 238, 303 

correspondence, 48, 131, 477, 518, 

568,576,654 

exile, 371, 373 

food parcels, 48, 51, 152, 207, 418, 

654 

spouses divorced, 238 

visits, 96, 122, 136, 224-25 

see also children and juveniles 

Farmakov, Arseny, 135 

Feldman, Boris M., 40, 333, 682 

Feoktist, 28n 

Fetisov, 550 

Filimonov, 546 

Filimonovo Branch Railroad, 35 

Finn, K. (Finn-Khalfln, Konstantin 

Y.), 82, 682 

Finnish War, 139, 140 

Firin, Semyon G., 81, 91, 92, 99," 102 

The First Circle, 675n, 676n, 678n 

The First Glo"e, 607-08 

Fittstuni, 44ft 

Five-Year Plans see economy and 

economic planning, Five-Year 

Plans 

F1orensky, Father Pavel A .. 44ft, 641, 

670-71, 682 

The PilIQI' and the Affirmation of 

the Truth, 670 

Fonvizin, Denis I., 152ft, 682 

"Four-sixths" law, 382ft 

Franco, Francisco, 125 

free employees (volnyashki), 51, 53, 

237, 262, 459, 539, 566-73, 584 

Frenkel, Naftaly A., 48, 49, 75, 76-78, 

80,91,92,99, 138-41, 155,276, 

535, 587 

Fridman. G •• 57n . 

Frolov. Vasily A •• 567 

Frunze. M~ail V .• 560. 682 

Fuster. 541. 542 

Fyodorov. Nikolai F .• 641. 682 

Fyodorov. Sergei S •• 296 

Fyodorova. Zoya A •• 498. 682 

Gakayev. 549 

Gammerov. Boris. 168-69. 172. 175. 

184. 186. 192. 193-94. 195 

Gandal. Berta. 525n 

Gannibal. Pavel I •• 28, 682 

Garanin. 128. 129. 535 

"Garanin" executions. 128-29. 130. 

305. 386; 535 

Garasyeva, Tatyana, 347 

Gashidze, 56 

Gavrik. 128, 1-30 

Gavrilovich, Yevgeny I •• 82, 682. 

Geller. Anatoly I., 333, 682 

Gendal. Samuil. 350-51 

Generalov, Grigory Y., 295 

Ger. R. M .• 329 

Gerasimov. M •• 551 

German (saint), 27, 49, 682 . 

Germans (in Soviet camps), 131. 138. 

184, 262,405n, 525,593 

sren~p of war. 480, 545 

Germany: Nuremberg Trials. 616 

Soviet prisoners of War. 187 

Gershman. Morris, 303n 

Gershuni, Grigory A., 682 

Gershuni. Vladimir L., 316. 682 

Gertsenberg, Perets. 301, 357 . 

Gertsenzon. A. A .• 21n 

Gettis, A. I., 333 

Gevorkyan, Sokrat. 320 

Gikalo, Nikolai F., 333. 682 

Ginzburg, Yevgeniya S., 130, 334, 

33'sn, 342-43, 619, 682 

Girichevsky, 299 

GlavLeslag (Chief Administration of 

Logging Camps), 140 

GlavHt; 103 . 

GlavPromstroi (Chief Administration 

of Camps for Industrial 

Production), 140 . 

Glazunov (Glaznek), Osvald. 500-01 

Glazunova, Izolda V., 500, 501 

Glebov, A., 244 

Glezos, Manolis, 655, ·682 

Glik,509 

Glikin, Isidor, 641 

GHnka, Mikhail I., 496. 682 

Glubokovsky, B., 39, 44n 

dlo~" drive," 77 

gold mining, 126, 128, 129. 157, 198, 

199. )97, 408. 579, 585. 593: see 

also mining 

GDHtsyn, V. P •• 337 

GDloded •. NikDlai M •• 333, 682 

GDltsman, Yeygeoiya, 334 

GDlushko, 430n 

GDlyakDv, Ivan T., 682-83 

GDmulka, WladysIaw, 352 

GDnlDir. Camille L., 486 

GDrbatov. AleksandrV •• 336-37, 343, 

553, 604. 683 

GDrdDn. G. 0 .• 44n 

GDrky. Maxim (A1eksei M. Peshkov). - 

63n. 381. 382,425.444,494,682 

"Histories of Factories lind 

Plants," 81 

SoIDvetsky. visit to. 60-63. 523 

White Sea-Baltic Canal (BelomDr). 

book Dn, 81. 82. 85, 93: see also 


GDrny GDldfields. 128 

GDrshkDV, FyodDr V., 572-73 

GDrshkDv, Vasily. 573 

GDrshunDv. Vladimir S., 135 

GDryac:henkD. 645 

GosherDn de la Foss, 44n 

GDvDrkD. NikDIai K., 324 

.GPU (State PDliticai Administration). 

77,317 . 

Grruina, N •• 130 

"GrigDrovich Commission," 387 

. GrigDryeV; OrigDry I .• 420. 624-26 

Grin. Aleksandr S., 485. 682 

Grinberg. 546 . 

Grinvalel, Mikhail. 497 

Grodzensky. Y. D., 627 

GrDmDv, 546 

Gruzdev. I. A .• 20cTn 

guards. 23,43. 46. 123, 142, 544. 575 

cDnvoy guards. 23, 126. 128. 221, 

250. 389. 390, 393. 398, 399. 

557-62: "TDnshayevo wDlves." 

558; during wartime, 378. 392. 

560-61; see also trusties. below 

trusties (self-guarding Py prisoners). 

44, 45. 47-48, 250. 251, 254, 

264, 392, 562-63, 622 . 

VNUS (Internal Service), 23 

VOKhR (Militarized Guard 

Service), 23. 92, 557-62, 566 

White Russians. 46, 47-49. 64 

see also. dog§.. (police dDgs); jailers 

GUdDVich. D .• 44n 

Guganava, .Boris. 261 

GI/iding Principles of the Criminal 

Law of the R.s.P.s.R .• 144.146 

GUI'l'L . (Chief Administration of 

Corrective Labor Camps), 23. 24 

I

GUItu (Cbief Administration of 

Corrective Labor Institutions), 23 

GULZbDS (Cbief Administration of 

Camps for Railroad Colistruction), 

139-40, 141, 241 

GULGMP (Chief Administration of 

. Camps for the Mining and . 

Metallurgical Industry), 140 

Gumilyev, Lev 'N., 49511, 677n, 683 

GUMZ/GUMZak. (Chief Administra 

. tion for Places of Imprisonment), 

22.23, 123 

GUPR (Cbief Administration' for 

Forced Labor), 22 

GurkiJla, Nastya, 225-26 

Herzen, Aleksandr 1.,151,683 

borses, 38, 89, 91-92, 199, 202, 

258-59, 42911-43011 

Husak, .Gustav, 35ln 

Ibsen, Henrik: An Enemy 0/ the 

People, 604 

'. 

Igarka, 140, 565, 586, 592 

Ignatcbenko. 262, 544 

Ignatovsky, 296 

'Inber, Vera M., 82, 426, 683 

Inchik. Vera, 463 

informers see stool pigeons 

Ingal, Zhora, 168-69, 172, 174, 175, 

184, 185-86 ~ 

Institute of Buddhist Culture, 643, 644 

Inta, 73, 222, 506; see also . 

UkhtPechlag 

. intelligentsia, 44, 280-81 

in camp, 582-83. 631 

Ioselevii:h, A., 313 

Istnyuk, 389n 

Ivancbenko. 87-88 

Ivancbik, 345 

Ivanov, 29-30 

Ivanov. 320 

Ivanov. Mikhail D., 643 

Ivanov, Vsevolod V., 82, W 

Ivanovo: Solzbenitsyn in, 45~57 

Ivanov-Razumnik (Razumnik V. 

Ivanov), 351n, 683 

Ivanovsky (Ivan()v), Nikolai P .• 541. 

683 

Ivanovsky. 19 

lvashev-Musatov, 626 

Ivdellag, 138, 397 

Izhorsk Factory: Special Design 

Bureau,87n . 

Izvestlya, 430n, 433n, 553, 554, 579n, 

643n 

jailers: camp, 239, 554-CS7, 566, 575 

prison, 11. 12, 538, ~S6 . 

INDEX 699 

''TbeUnionof.PrisonEmployees.'' 1-1 

see also guards 

Japanese (prisoners of war ill Soviet 

camps), 30~9 . 

J asienski. Bruno, 683 

Jobnson. Hewlett, 57n. 683 

judiciary see laws and judiciary 

juveniles see cbildren and juveniles 

Kabalevsky, Dmitri B •• . 12011,683 

Kaban, 608 

Kacha, 586-87 

Kadar, Janos, 352 

Kady case: trial, 162 

Kaganovicb, Lazar M., 84, 141. 683 

Kaktyn, Artur M. (Arturs Kaktins). 

333, 683 

Kalashnikov, 379 

Kalinin, Mikhail I., 123. 162, 181,. 

318n, 683 

Kalinina, M. I., 488-89 

Kallistov, D. P., 56 

Kaluga Gates, 287n; 544, 599-600 

Solzbenitsyn in, 202, 232, 236, 

266-90, 360, 426-27, 499-501, 

544. 545. 556, 568n, 569-73, 591 

Kalugin, I. D .• 4411 

Kalyanov, V. I., 644,·683 

Kamensky, 138 

Kamyshlag, 662, 663 . 

Kansk,I38 

Kapitsa, Pyotr L., 482, 683 

Kaplan, Fanya, 17,525,683 

Kapustin,5S3-54 

Karaganda, 138, 566, 593; see also 

Steplag 

Karashcbuk, 574,678n 

Karev, 547 

Kargopollag, 549 

Kari,76n 

Karlag, 132,201, 207,234,403,404. 

654n 

Kamoukhy. Lyoska, 418 

Karpunich-Braven, Ivan S .• 126-27. 

132 

Kashketin, 387, 390, 535 

"Kashketin fl executions, 386-90 

Katayev, Valentin P" 82, 684 

Katyn.42n 

Kaveshan, V. Y .• 638. 639 

Kazak,542 

Kazak. O. P., 542 

Kazakhs. 396. 404 

Kazakhstan, 74, 138. 594 

Kazan: prison, 334 

Kelly, 600 

Kem (Kemperpunkt). :t2-33, 34. 48. ' 

53. 55, 66, 72, 77, 147 

700 INDEX 

Kemerlag, 1S7 

Kemerovo, 625 

Kamysh1ag, 662, 663 

Kengir, 222, 248, 249, 262, 542, 589 

workshops, 588-91 

Kermaier, 316 

Khakasiiya, 138, 593 

Khatsrevin, Zakhari, 82, 685 

Khimki, ISO, 541 

Khishchuk, 574, 678n 

Kholmogory, 18 

_ 

Khovrino, 136-37, 478, 497, 546, 549 

Khrushchev, Nikita S .. 339n, 580, 

676n 

Khrustalyev, 92 

Kirov, Sergei M., 96, 311, 677n, 684 

Kisilyov, 555 

Kizel,565 

Kizilov, Pyolr, 433 

Kleinmikhel, PyOIr A., 276, 676ft 

Klempner, Volodya, 487-88 

Klodt, 44ft 

Klyuchkin, 423-24 

Knyazh-Pogost, 543, 599 

Kochmes, 387, 546 

Kogan. Lazar, 84, 92, 96ft.99, 102, 

122 

Kolchak, Aleksandr V., 426, 684 

Kolnyshevsky, Pyolr, 28-29, 684 

Kolodeznikov, 576 

Kolychev (Filipp), Fyodor S., 27n. 

684 

Kolyma, 127-32 passim, 143. IS7, 

234,255,319. 334. 343, 376. 397. 

407, 417, 498, 507.- 514, 544. 

553. 579, 585. 593. 671 

Elgen. 132, 398; Mylga, 126, 128, 

130 

escapes, 395-99 passim, 

"Garanin" executions, 128-29. 130, 

305, 386, 535 

Orotukan. 128. 384-85 

writing on, 130, 145; Sha1amov, 

KolymtJ Stories. 7. 130,201,207. 

214. 62311, 688; Shelest, Ko/ymtJ 

Notes. 346. 348. 350-51; see also 

Ginzburg, Yevgeniya S., 

Sliozberg. Olga L. Surovtaeva, 

Nadezhda 

Komarov. 385. 549 

Komarovsky. 44n 

Komis, 396, 677n 

Komogor. L. A., 132-33 

Komov. Valentin I., 671 

Komsomol (Young Communist 

League), 1S5. 310, 340, 568n, 

579, 581, ~5 

Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, 579, 592 

Kondo,308 

Kon40strov, 48-49 

Konev. Nikolai. 316-17- 

Konokotin, 348, 350 

Kononenko, M. 1.,129 

Konspai, 420 

The Kopeck, 76, 140 

Kopelev, Lev Z., 641, 684 

Koptyayev, Vitya, 463 

Koreans (in Soviet camps), 405n 

Kork, Avgust I., 333, 684 

Korkina, 386 

Kornfeld, Boris N .. 612-13 

Komilov, Lavr G., 313. 684 

Korolenko, V. Y., 44ft 

Korolev. Sergei P., 482, 684 

Kototilsyn, 549 

Korzinkin, 395 

Kosior, Stanislav V., 333, 684 

Kosmodemyanskaya, Zoya A.. 466, 

598.684 

Kosyrev. F. M., 537 

Kotelnichesky Embankment: 

Camp 15,545 

Kotik, liza, 351 

Kotlag, 72 

Kot1as: prison. 345 

Kotlas-Vorkuta Railroad, 73, 202, 

580, 586, 592 

Kovacs. 325 

Kovacs, Rosa, ~5 

Kovrov, 652n 

Kovtyukh, Yepifan J., 333. 684 

Kozhevnlkov, Innokenti S .• 64. 684 

Kozin. Vadim, 498 

Kozmin, Vasily. 237 

KR/KR's (Counter-Revolutionaries). 

53,292 

Kras1ag. 138,203,345, 399,438, 

,9~ 621, 638 

Reshoty, 208, 261 

Revuchi, 308, 423 

Krasnaya GtU.eta, 19 

Krasnaya Glinka, 357n 

Krasnaya Gorka, 56 

Krasnaya Presnya, 136 

. Solzhenilsyn in, 228 

Krasnaya Vishera, 72 

Krasnovodsk, 88 

Krasnoyarsk, 138; see also Kraslag 

KrasUlskaya, Vera, 651 

Kratov, 351 

Kresty, 10 

Krivoshchekovo, 454, 494-95 

Camp No.1. 229, 233-34, 235, 

237,_ 455, 462 

Camp No.2 (Novosiblag), 217, 

458-59 - -

INDEX 701 

702 INDEX 

Krizhanich, Yuri, 152n, 684 

Krokhalyov, 436n-437n 

Kropotkin, Pyotr A., 312, 313-14, 

637, 684 

-Kruglov, Sergei N., 27S-76, 684 

Krupskaya, Nadezhda K., 333 

Krutikov, 386 

Krylenko, Nikolai V., 22, 304, 658n, 

684 

Krylov, Ivan A., 529, 685 

Krzhizhanovsky, Gleb M., 314, 685 

Kudlaty,_ 540, 553 

Kudryashev, M. A., 549 

Kukhtikov, 552 

kulaks, 22, 71, 86, 96; 305, 335, 370 

KlID, Bela, 333, 685 

Kuragin, 262, 544 

Kw'anakh-saIa, 416 

Kurchatov, Igor V., 407, 68S 

Kurganov, I. A., 10, 68S 

Kurilko, 32-33, 39, 40, 46, 65n, 120 

Kurinevsky, Dmitri, 320 

Kursky, Dmitri I., 17,22, 685 

Kutyakov, Ivan S., 333, 68S 

Kuzemko, Y., 84n, 93n, l09n 

Kuzikriv-Skachinsky, 399 

Kuzma, 562-63- 

KVZhD (Chin\lSCl Eastern Railroad), 

403, 406 

labor armies, 20, 72, 142 

labor camps, corrective see camps 

labor colonies, agricultural see 

agricultural labor colonies 

labor colonies, corrective, 21, 22, 74 

Labor Front, 133 

labor homes, corrective, 21, 447 

Laci! see Latsis 

Laksbin, Vladimir Y., 257, 348n, 685 

Landau, Lev D., 482, 685 

Langovoi, 654n 

Lapin, Boris M., 82, 685 

Latsis, Martyn I., 333, 685 - 

Latsis, Vilis T., 677n, 685 

To the New Shore?, 370, 677n 

laws and judiCiary, 9, 18, 22 

camp courts, 385-86, 475 

Code of Criminal Procedure, 602 

Constitution, 13-14 

decrees, 15, 17, 23, 75, 106, 238, 

449,539 

"Four-sixths" law, 382n 

Guiding Principles 0/ the· Criminal 

Law 0/ the R.s.F .s.R., ·144, 146 

labor system outlined, 14, IS-16, 

124n 

"Seven-eighths" law, 285, 335 

Special Boards, 319, 602 

"Statutes on Places of 

Confinement," 581 

Tsarist regime, 200 

see also Corrective Labor Code; 

Criminal Code; sentences 

Lebedev, 478 

Leibowitz, Samuel, 147 

Lekhtonen, Anya, 240 

Lenin, Vladimir I., 342, 344, 585 

assassination attempt, by Kaplan, 

17,525,683 

pn punisbment and the penal 

system, 9-10, 11, 17, 144 

Leningrad, 10, 13, 49, 594 

World War II, 133, 134, 371 

-Leonov; Leonid M., 425, 638, 685 

Leshcheva, Zoya, 466-61_ 

Leskov, Nikolai S., 500, 685 

Levashov, V., 44n 

Levin, Aron, 316 

Levin, Lev G., 639, 685 

LevkoVich, 553 

Likhachev, Dmitri S., 44n, 685 

Lipai, I. F., 262-63, 301, 416, 543 

Lisov, 661 

Literaturnaya Gazeta, 430-31, 434-35, 

579n, 623n, 655n 

Lithuanians: persecution and arrests, 

249, 259, 438, 599, 621 

see also Baltic States 

logging projects, 48, 54, 55, 72, 101, 

102, 133, 135, 162-67 passim, 

199-200,201,249-50,259,393, 

579, 585-86, 586-87, 593, 594 

GIavLesLag (Chief Administration 

of Logging Camps), 140 

Logovinenko, 549 

Lokchimlag, 382 

Lomaga, Pyotr, 397 

Lomov-Oppokov, Georgi I., 333, 685 

Loshchilin, Stepan V., 234n, 262, 294, 

. 664-70 

Losev, 658, 659, 660 

The Love Girl and the ,nnocent, 232n, 

675n 

LozinO'Lozinsky, V., 44n 

Lubyanka, 228, 307, 661 

Luchenetsky, 605 

Lunin, Ale,!csandr, 563 

Lyalya,244 

MacDonald, James Ramsay,184, 

285,685 

Magadan, 498, 565, 579, 592, 651 

Maisner, M. M., 641-42 

Makarenko, Anton S., 425, 677n, --686 

Maksimov, 294 

Maldyak goldfields, 408 

Malenkov, Georgi M .. 338, 686 

Ma1idin, 550 

Malkov, 525n 

Ma1sagoff, S. A.:-An 'sland Hell, 

59-60 

Maltsev, Mikhail M., 552 

Mamulov, 136, 137, 4!J7, 54!J, 550 

Mandelstam, Nadezhda Y., 634, 

636-37, 678n 

Mamierheim, Carl Gustaf, 686 

Manzovka, 325-26 

Marchenko, Anatoly T •• QI(j 

My Testimony. 3!J7n, 677n. '" 

Marchenko, Nikolai V. see Narokov 

Marfino, 147-48, 3!J3. 551-52 

Solzhenitsyn in, 147-4!J. 26()...(jI, 

366-67, 47!J. 481. 676n 

Mariinak, 125. 138, 416 

Markin, V. S., 643 

Martinson, 382, 45!J 

Marx, Karl, !J. ISS, 256, 302 

"Critique of the Gotha Program," 

13, 1:43 

Maslov, !J2, 100 

Matronina, Olga P., 180-82, 183, l!Jl, 

1!J5.1!J6 

Matveyev, D. M., 545, 554 

Matyushin, 188n 

MayakoVBky, Vladimir V., 300, 382, 

425,686 

Medved.ev, 546 

Medvezhyegonk.72,!J8,loo.444,5!J!J 

Meister, 640 

Meiyer, A. A., 44n 

Mekhanoshin, 330 

Menahliviks, 331n 

Menzhinaky, Vyacheslav R., 681 

Merinov, 54!J 

Merkulova, Tatyana, 546 

Methodius, Father, 31,51 

Metter, Izrail M., 686 

"Murat," 534ft 

Melyolkin, Vasily F .. 652 

Mezhov, Adolf, 63!J 

Mezhov, lzabella, 63!J 

Mihajlov, Mihajlo, !J, IS, 686 

"Mikhail, Emperor." 154 

Mikhailovsky,311 

military forces: Civil War., 1!J, 20-21, 

88,427 

Finnish War, 13!J, 140 

former military as camp personnel, 

46, 47-4!J, 64, 35!J, 3!J8, 621 

Red Army, creation of, !J 

World War I, 17 

see also prisonen of war: World 

, warn 

Milyuchikhin, 437n 

_ 

Minakov, 546-47 

Minayev. G •• 434-35 

minin&74, 143, 1!J~!J,565.580,5!J3 

coal, I!J!J, 203. 580, 5!J3 

gold. 126, 128, i2!J, 157, 1!J8. 199, 

3!J7, 408. 57!J. 585, 593 

GULGMP (Chief Administration 

of Camps for the Mining and 

Meta1lurgica1lndustry),14O 

Minlag,4!J8 

Mironenko, 37!J, 380 . 

Mironov, 267. 501 

Model, 38!Jn 

Moinly, 138, 404 

Moiseyevaite, 622, 626 

Molotov, Vyacheslav M., 577, 686 

Moor, Karl, 313, 425 

More, Thomas: Utopia, 578 

"Moroz," 388 

Moroi, Y. M., 134 

Morozov, 551 

Morozov, Nikolai A., 631, 686 

Morozov, Pavlik (Pavel T.), 355. 647, 

686 

"Moscow," 320, 321 

Moscow: camps and prisona, 16. 136, 

137, 5!J4; Andronnikov, 1!J; 

Beskudnikovo, 487, 497; Butyrki, 

227, 488n, SOl; Ivanovsky, 1!J; 

Khimki, 150,541; Khovrino, 

136-37,-478,497. 546, 54!J; 

Krasnaya Presnya, 136. 228; 

Lubyanka, 228, 307, 661; 

Novinsky, 246; Novospassky, I!J; 

Ostankino Museum. 149, 517, 

678n 

see also Kaluga Gates; Marfino 

Moscow People's Volunteer Corps, 

4!J8 

Moscow-IO, 407 

Moscow-Volga Canal, 80, 85, 96, 102, 

lOS, 10!J, 111, 113, 115, 116, 

117-18,216,437, 562, S7!J, 5!JI, 

607n 

Muravlyov, Fyodor I., -569-70 

Muravyov (Fob), 303n 

Muromtsev, V. S., 44ft 

MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), 

160 

camp personnel, 536, 538, 541, 543, 

552; see also guards; jailers 

Mylga, 126, 128, 130 

Myobus,44n 

Nagel, Irena, 420-21 

Naidyonov, Nikolai, 404 

Napolnaya, 236 

Nl\I'odniki (populists), 157

INDEX 703 

704 INDEX 

Narokov (Marchenko), Nikolai V.: 

lmaglMry Values, 331n' 

nationalities and ethnic groups: 

persecution and arrests, 249, 259, 

264,,351, 367, 371, 438, 560, 

599, 621 

see also exile and resettlement; 

individual peoples 

'Nedov, 487 

Nekrasov, 44n 

Nekrasov, Nikolai A., 500, 686 

Nekrasov, Viktor P., 686 

In the Trenches of Stafmgrad, 426 

Nemstev, Ivan, 109 

NEP see New Economic Policy 

Nerchinsk, 200-01, 204 

Nesterovsky; 299 

Nevezhin, 266-67, 545 

Nevsky,559 

Nevsky (Krivobokov), Vladimir L, 

333,686 

New Economic Policy (NEP), 23, 43, 

427 

Nezhdan, 302-03 

Nicholas I, Tsar, 527 

Nikishov, 498 

NikiEhov, 549 

Nikitina, Yelena, 347 

Nikolayevsky, Tadik, 389n 

Nikon, Patriarch (Nikita Minov), 

28n,686 . 

Nik1i!in, Lev V., 82, 686 

Nilova Hermitage, 74 

Nivagres, 396 

Nizhni Novgorod, J9 

NKVD (People's Commissariat of 

Internal Affairs), 22, 23, 123, 

124ft, 125, 126 

Nogtev, 18n, 55, 57-58 . 

Norillag, 138, 435 

,k~liroN 145, 237, 497, 506, 535, 549, 

592 

'Novinsky, 246 

,~albisovoN 217, 458-59 

Novospaasky, 19 

Novy Iyerusalim, 169, 170, 182, 184, 

190, 193, 67Sn 

Solzhenitsyn in, 168-86, 190-97 

passim, 266, 360-66 

Novy Mlr, 2S7n, 3480, 534n, 535n, 

580n,604n 

nucleat pro'ects, 407, 593 

Nugis. EJmar, 420 

Nuksha, 210 

Nuremberg Trials, 616 

Nyrob1!lg, 138, 397, 551, 559, 

561-62, 563, 594 

OGPU (United State Political 

Administration), 115-16,447 

GUITL (Chief Administration of 

Corrective Labor Camps), 23, 24 

Ogurtsov, 221 . 

Oimyakon, 436n-437n 

Oksmao, Yulian G •• 649, 686 . 

OklJabr, 337n, 35ln . 

Okunevskaya, Tatyana K., 498, 686 

Olchan, 398 . 

Olitskaya, Yekaterina A., 307, 334-35 

Olminsky, Mikhail S., 61On, 686 

OnchuI, Stepan G., 633,n 

One Day In the Ufe of Ivan 

Denisovlch: 

Communists on, 209 

Moskovskaya Pravda on, 344 

Shalamov on, 203n-204n 

Solzhenitsyn on, 256, 257, 258, 

264-65, 307-08, 337, 649 

Opoki,585 

Orachevsky, 281-83, 285, 286, 289, 

360,571 

Ordzhonikidze, Grigory K., 333, 687 

Orlov, Nikolai M., 483 

Orlova, Y. M., 132 

Orlov-Kamenetsky, 320 

Orotukan, 128, 384-85 

Ortau, 240, 551, 558, 561 

Orthodox Church, 657 

monasteries and nwineries uied as 

camps and prisons, 19, 74 

see also religious and religious 

believers; Solovetsky Islands, 

monastic life 

Orwel\, George, 322 

1984,331 

Osintsev, 379 

Osman, 239 

OSO see Special Boards 

Osoblagi see Special Camps 

Osorgin, Gll9rgi M., 44-45 

Ostretsova, A1eksandra" 228 

Ostretsova, Shurochka, 501 

Otsep, 271 

Ovsyannikov, 301 

Ozerlag, 262 

Ozerov, 44n 

Palchinskaya, Nina A., 637 

Palchinsky, Pyotr A., 312-14, 323, 

637,687 _ 

Palitsyn, Avraami (Averki I.), 28, 

15ln,687 

Panin, 338, 676n 

Papanin, Ivan D., 645, 687 

Paramonov, 115n 

Parma, 421, 551, 562 

Pasbkov, Ivan, 302-03 

passports, internal, 634 

Pasternak, Boris, 186, 675n 

Paul, Tsar, 86 . 

Pavlov, 128, 549 

Pavlov, Geli, 463 

Pavlov, Vasya, 267-68, 288 

Pawel, Ernst, 117n . 

Pecbkovsky, Nikolai K., 498, 687 

Pechora, 73, 420; 593; see also 

UkhtPechlag 

Pechorlag, 73, 221, 549 

PechZhelDorlag. 498, 549, 586 

Pellico, Silvio, 604, 605, 687 

penal system and theory, 13-24, 

71-72,144 . 

conferences and congresses, 115n, 

144,304,329,581 

labor system outlined, 14, 15-16, 

124n 

Lenin, V. I., 9-10, 11, 17, 144 

Marx, Karl, 13, 143 

"observers' commissions," 

124n-l2Sn 

see also AI(erbakh, I. L.; camps; 

Chekhov, Anton P., on hard 

labor and Sakhalin; People's 

Commissariat of Justice; prisons; 

Vysbinsky,.Andrei Y. 

People's Commissariat of Education, 

447,538 

People's Commissariat of Justice, 238 

251 

Central Penal Department and penal 

system, 11, 14, 16, 17-18, 

22-23, 124n, 447-48, 538-39, 

673n-674n 

Peregud, Fyodor, 643 

Peregud, Nina, 237, 465-66, 598 

Perekova (Reforging), 105, 113 

Pere1omov, 157 

P.erm Railroad, 133, 565 

Pertominsk, 18 

Peters, Yakov'K., 333, 687 

Peter I (Peter the Great), Tsar, 86, 

687 

PetJyura, Simon V., 28, 687 

Petrov, 129 

Petrovsky, Grigory·1., 17, 22, 687 

Pigulevskaya, Nina V., 44n, 687 

Pioneers, 155, 645 . 

Pisarev, Dmitri I., 604, 687 

Pisarev, I. G., 629 

Plekhanov, Georgi V., 303n, 687 

Pletnev, Dmitri D., 639, 687 

Pobozhi, Aleksandr, 535, 687 

'''Ibe Dead Road," 580 

PochtaJ', Yakov Y., 31S 

PodIesny, 546 

Podolsk, 556 

Pogodin (Stukalov), Nikolai F., 100, 

425, 443-445, 687 

Poisui-Shapka, 262 

Poles (in Soviet camps), 131, 134 

Polevoi-Genkin, 320 

Polottlyanshchikov, Fyodor, 317n 

Polya, Auntie, 240 

Polyakov, G., 44n 

Polyakova, 437 

Polyamy Spring. 128-29 

Popov, 433 

Popov, AJ.eksandr S., see Serafimovich 

Popov, Blagoi S., 638, 687 

Popular Socialist Party, 12-13 

Postyshev, Pavel P., 329, 687 

Potapov, 496 

Potapova, M. Y., 300 

Potemkin, 53 

Potma, 74, 286, 594. 605 

Povalyayeva, Zinaida Y., 39~ 

Povenets, 93 

Pravda,646 

Moskovskaya Pravda, 344 

Petrogradskaya Pravda,. 313n 

Pravdin, 277-80, 282, 283, 288, 676n 

Preobrazhensky, ArChpriest, 310, 323 

Primakov, Vitaly M., 333, 687 

Priselkov, Mikh8U D., 44n, 687 

Prishvin, MikhaU M., 25; 687 

prisoners: artists, 4n, 486-88 

"bitches" (''half-breeds''), 126, 

190,347,359,422,428,437, 

438,530 . . 

bodr searches, 15 1. 207 

cannibalism, 398, 424 

classification, 78, 149-50 

clothing, 32, 35-36, 61, 98. 152, 

184, 20S-O~, 212, 213, 224, 383, 

504, 667, 668; jnveni1es, 35; 61, 

67,459; saved from corpses, 125, 

222;trusties,252,253,263 

"commandments"'rules, 511-20 

commissary, 51, 113 . 

Communists, 134, 180, 209, 264, 

315, 322,.-52, 367 

correspondence, 48, 131,477, 518, 

568, 576, 654; within camp, 

248-49 

days off and holidays, 128, 151, 

207, 248, 515 . 

death, 52, 99, 122, 125, 126,201, 

210-11, 215-16, 221-23, 384, 

3115; mass executions and burials, 

42-43, 64, 65, 128-29, 130, 222, 

,~03 347, 376-77, 386-90, 535 

deprivees, 19-20, 21, 506

prisoners (cOIIti"ued) 

divorce by spouses, 238 

escapes and escape attempts, 18, 

511-60,67,349,391-413,455,599 

folklore and oral literature, 505, 

510, 520-21, 525, 527 

food and drink, 51, 98, 113, 118, 

123, 126, 137, 152, 155-56, 173, 

194, 200-03, 204, 208, 209. 212, 

262,263, 384, 385, 387, 394, 

453, 504, 514-15, 668, 669, 

675,,; penalty ration, 113, 127, 

202, 383, 416, 418-19, 423; 

thieves, 93, 202, 435-36, 440; 

trusties, 202, 252, 253, 263; 

during wartime, 132, 133, 199, 

203; and work norm, 113, 117, 

192, 202, 511, 512, 568 

food parcels, 48, 51, 152, 207, ·418, 

654 

friendships, 223-24, 627; see also 

men and women below 

homosexUality, 248, 249, 422 

humor, 527-28 

hunger strikes, 319-20, 387, 391 

illness and disease, 51, 52, 78, 96, 

125, 126, 128, 150, 206, 210-11, 

216, 217-18, 221, 234-35, 236, 

387, 660; release on medical 

grounds, 218, 220-21; see also 

. camps, Medical Section 

instruction, political. 106. 434. 436, 

453-54, 468, 469, 470-71. 

476-77,492 

instruction. professional and 

technical. 122. 471 

inventions and patents submitted by. 

478-83 

language, 242. 308. 353-54, 358". 

505, 508-09, 529-32, 677,,; 

term "zek." 50~7 

last-1eggers/goners. 126-27, 129, 

208-12 passim. 215. 221. 222. 230 

life stories told by. 525-27 

living accommodations, 33-34. 53. 

69, 98. 136. 2~. 208, 515, 

516; tents. 98. 128.206. 384. 385. 

387; thieves, 395. 417. 435. 440; 

trusties, 253. 263; vagonki. 98, 

171,206 

living near camp after release. 566 

men and women separated, 152-53. 

246-49.508 

men and women together. 246; 

camp marriages. 150. 224. 225, 

237.238.240.241.247.249.435, 

675n; children born, 67, 238, 

241-47 passim; liaisons and 

INDEX 

70S 

romances, 230, 231, 232, 237-41 

passim, 247, 248 

number of, estimates, 10, 21, 205n, 

234" 

personal possessions. 152, 171. 206. 

516 

petitions, 242, 336, 342, 349. 367, 

477.660.663-64 

punishment. 36. 38, 43, 48, 49, 54. 

56. 127. 248, 385. 414-24; 

confinement in death carriages, 

127-28; confinement· in Penalty 

Isolator (ShJzo), 36, 38, 78, 127, 

136. 150. 215, 347, 376, 414, 

415-16; confinement in pi~. 416; 

for escape atem~ts, 18. 394, 

396-?7; food ration cut. 113, 

127,202.383. 416, 418-19, 423;. 

of stool pigeons, by other 

prisoners, 359; Strict Regimen 

Barracks (BUR). 150. 177.415. 

417-18; Strict Regimen Camp 

Compounds (ZUR), 415. 418-24; 

Strict Regimen Companies . 

(RUR), 4l5; thieves, beatings by, 

126, 388. 421, 436, 438, 445; 

women. 128, 148. 239. 419, 420, 

624; see also death above; 

sentences, in camp 

reforgiDg. 67, 425, 444 

sanitary facilities, 34, 51, 171, 207, 

229,384-85,418,419.483,603,668 

-self-government and supervision: in' 

early years, 11,44-49 passim. 

68-69, 70, 116-19, 122; see also 

trusties 

self-inflicted injuries, 216, 219-20, 

415. 422, 599 

serfs, comparison with, 149-54, 513 

''suckers'' (frayer), 422.434", 445, 

531 

suic:idlll, rarity of, 599-600 

thieves see "bitches" above; thieves 

tobacco, importance of, 139. 173. 

357, 514 

visits. 96. 122, 136. 224-25 

work: altitude toward. 159. 510-13. 

516-17. 583; altitude toward. by 

Communist prisoners. 347-49; 

categories. assignment to, 216: 

principle of ''rubber." 166. 411, 

512: tukhta/tufta, 69, 95. 158, 

160-67 passim, 571. 572: wages 

received. 15-16. 132. 204 

work, llCIIeral, 13-17, 19, .54, 78, 

95, lOS. 109. 111. 115, 116-17, 

127, 128, 149 •. 156-60 passim. 

201.234,235,236. 240, 247. 

706 INDEX 

prisoners: work (continued) 

249-50, 254-55, 256, 442, 

510-13,516-17, 583; 609, 674n, 

675n; assigners and norm setters, 

158, Hil, 253, 254, 437, 567, 

674n; brigadiers (bugey), 93, 

lS7, 158, 159, 161, 2)3,256, 347, 

569, 571; carts and sledges drawn 

by prisoners, 36, 127, 397, 419, 

451, 579;'foremen and 

superVisors, 157-61 pasSim, 215, 

254, 567, 569, 570, 571, 573; 

line-ups, 171-72, 252, 254; 

penalty work, lSO, 177, 415, 

418-24; shock workers, 67, 68, 

69, 105, 106, 109, 111, 113, 115, 

156, 202-03, 437, 470, 473; 

women, 109, Ill, 147, 181, 191, 

235, 236, 240, 247, 249-5(1; 

work norm, 75, 158, 160-61, 201, 

254,567; work norm and food 

riltion, 113, 117, 192, 202, 511, 

512, 568; work norm and length 

of workday, 15-i6, 54, 128, 

143, 151,201; see ,also building 

and construction projects; guards, 

. convoy guards;loggmg projects; 

, mining 

work, special-assignment (sharashka; 

Islands of Paradise), 87n, 260, 

478-79,676n 

work in camp, 78, 149, 251; as. 

servants, 67, 147, 149-50, 231, 

235, 543, 544-45, 574; workshops 

(khozdvor), 16, 252, 254, 544, 

588-90 see also trusties 

World War IT see Worl!i War H, 

camps 

writers and poets, 478, 488-89 

see also amnesty; cam'ps; family 

and relatives (of prISoner); 

prisons; sentences; women 

prisoners 

prisoners, nonpolitical, 20, 21, 49, 67, 

135, 2311, 245, 255, 309, 395 

see also amnesty; thieves; trusties 

prisoners of war: Civil War, 19,20, 

21,88 

World War I, 17 

World War H: German, 480, 545; 

Japanese, 308-09; Soviet,' 187 

prisoner transport, 21, 34, 48, 147, 

153,207,229,253,386,388,522, 

524; see also dogs (police dogs); 

guards, convoy guards 

prisons, 21. 229 

camp, 383, 384; Penalty Isolator 

(ShIzo), 36, 38, 78, 127, 136, 

ISO, 215,.347, 376, 414, 415-16 

and camp, comparison with, 136 

jailers, 11, 12, 538, 554-57, '566, 

575 

monasteries and nunneries used as, 

19,74 

Special Purpose Prison (TON),21, 

22 

for thieves, 446, 666 

for women, 246 

see also penal system and theory; 

Tsarist regime, prisons and camps 

Prokhorov, 270, 273, '1.77, 281, 

283-86, 360, 568n 

Prokhorov-Pustover, 235, 325-26, 347 

Prokofiev, Sergei S., 687 

Prokofyev, 333 

Promezhutochnaya. 563 

Promparty (Industrial Party), 641 

Pronman, 546 

prostitutes, 66-67, 575-76, 624 

Prugavin, Aleksandr S., 29n, 687 

Ptitsyn, Pyotr N., j06 

Punin, 192 

Pushkin (judge), 317n 

Pushkin, A1eksandr S., 152n, 382, 

425, 460, 532, 688 

Putna, Vitovt K., 333, 688 

Pyatakov, Georgi L, 333; 688 

railroads, 56-57, 73, 80, 101, 133, 

140, 202, 235. 241, 580, 586, 592 

BAM and BAMlag, 80, 138, 140,' 

142, 235, 325-26, 540, 543, 546, 

592 

Chinese Eastern Railroads 

(KVZhD),403,406 

GUlZhDS (Chief Administration 

of Camps for Railroad 

Construction), 139-40, 141, 241 

"Railroad of D:ath" (Salekhard 

Igarka) , 140, 586, 592 

Tsarist regime, 76 

see also individual lines 

Rappoport, Arnold, 384, 416, 552 

Rappoport, Yakov, 83-84, 99 

Raspopin,Ivashko, 302 

Reikhtman, Velvel, 316-17 

. religious and religious believers: 

arrests and imprisonment, 19, 

65-66, 118, 249, 309-10, 373-74, 

419-20, 464, 623-24; women, 

42, 67, 245, 310, 323,419, 420, 

421, 464, 624 

see.also Orthodoi Church 

Repetto (Elvira Trisolini), 542, 688 

Repnina. 521n 

Reshoty, 208, 261 

Rets, R. V., 130

INDEX 707 

708 INDEX . 

Rounov. Volodya, 299 

Revuchi. 308. 423 

Reznikov. 549 

Rikasilcha. ' 592ft 

Rikasilcha-Molotovsk Railroad. 592 

road construction. 55-56. 72. 592 

The Road to Ufe. 428. 677n 

Rodichev. 225 

Rodionov.314-15 

Roitman. 389n 

Rom, 346 

Ronzhin. Nikolai. 386 

Rostopchin. Count Fyodor. 494-95. 

677n 

Rostov.545 

Rote Fahne. 60 

Rozhansky. Ivan, 641 

Rubailo. A .. 621 

Rudzutak. Yan E .• 333. 688 

Runes. D, D .• 84n 

Rushchinsky. M. V •• 73 

Ruslariova. Lidiya A.. 498. 688 

R.ussell. Bertrand, 57n, 59n 

Ryabinin. :frol; 372. 373 

Ryabinin. N. I .• 299 

Ryazan: Kazausky. 19-20 

Rybinsk. 234n. 498 

Rykov. A1eksei I •• 71. 688 

Sabashnikov. S. M •• 638 

Sablin. Yuri V:. 333. 688 

Sachkova.236-37 

Sakhalin. 18. 78. 204. 222. 427. 540 

. Chekhovon. 78. 204. 540. 621. 628. 

630 

Salopayev. Kolka. 418 

Saltychikha (Darya N. Saltykova). 

239. 241. 688 

Samarka. 202. 605-06 

Samshel. Nina. 560-61 

Samson. Father. 31 

Samutin. 559 

Sarovskaya Hermitage. 74 

Sevely, Father. 606 

Savvaty. 27. 49. 688 

Schlilsselburg FortreSs. 13 

Sedova, Svetlana. 464-65 

selkhozy s~e agricultural labor 

colomes 

Selvinsky. Dva, (Karl) L.. 425. 688 

Semyonov. Nikolai Y •• 651-52 

Semyonova, Mariya I .• 651. 652 

Senin. 360-61. 364. 366. 5S6 

Senka, 302 

sentences. U. 45. 75. 188n 

in camp: courts, 38S-86. 475; 

resentencing, 129-30, 134. 135, 

154. 350, 375-77. 380-83. 398; 

resentencing for escape. 18. 394 

children and juveniles. 448-49 

death penalty. 18. 449. 467. 495n 

petitions for pardon. 242. 336. 

342.349,367.477.660.663-64 

. release of political prisoners delayed 

by "special orders," USn. 

131-32, 154. 180. 188n 

repeaters. 154, 376 

thieves, 428. 429. 436. 445-46 

time off and release before end of ' 

term, 78. 113. 1~ 436. 511; 

depriv!Uion .;,f, U5n. 220-21; 

on medical grounds, 218. 220-21; 

women with children bom in 

camp. 67. 238. 245 

se,e also amnesty; Criminal Code 

Serafimovich (Popov). A1ekaandr 

S •• 61On. 688 

Serebryakcwa. Galina I.. 325. 345. 

348. 349. 423. 688 

serfs, 239, 500 

barshchina (forced labor). 149. 151. 

153. 674n 

obrok system, 153. 674n 

owners compared with camp chiefs, 

150. 153. 540. 541. 544-45. 546 

prisoners compared with, 149-54. 

513 

Serpantinka. 129. 384 

settlements (near camp). 564-76 

SevDvinlag. 73. 262 

"Seven-ilighths" law. 285. ~35 

SevUraIlag.-13 

SevZhelDorlag. 73. 423-24. 496 

Shaginyan. Marietta S •• 153. 649. 688 

Shakhovskaya, Prince8ll. 44n. 53 

Shalamov, Varlam T., 157, 200-01. 

203n-204n. 214. 507. 618-19. 

623,627.688 

Kolyma Stories. 7. 130.201.207. 

214. 623n. 688 

and Solzhenltsyn. 203~204n, 

214-15.218 

Shapiro. MDthall, 320 

sharashka see prisoners. work, 

special-assignment 

Sbavirin. F. V .• 301 

Shcherbatsky, Fyodor I .• 643-44, 688' 

Sheinin. Lev R.. 428. 688 

Shekbter. Boris S .• 120n. 688 

Shelest, G .• 345 

Kolyma Notes. 346,348.350-51 

Shepchinsky. 40. 64. 68 

Sheremeta, 477 

Sheremeteva, 44n 

Shereshevsky. Nikolai A., 639. Ci88 

Shestakova, 124n-125n 

Shevchenko. Taras G .• 521. Ci88 

Shikin, 357 ' 

ShipovaInikov, Father Viktor, 420 

Shirinskaya--Shakhmatova,.44n 

Shirokova, Katya, 334 

Shitarev, 225-26 

ShkIinik, 136 

Shklovsky, Viktor D., 82, 688 

Shlikhter, Aleksandr G., 333, 688 

Shmidt, Otto, 145, 674n 

Sholokhov, Mikhail A., 214 

Shostakovich, Dmitri D., 120n, 688 

The Young lAdy and tire 

Hooligll1l, 425 

Shturmovoi goldfields, 585 

Shubin, 333 

Shulman, 547 

Shved, I. V., 416-17 

Sidorenko, 420, 421 

Sidorenko, Sasha, 262 . 

Sikorski, W1adyalaw, 131n, 134, 689 

Sinebryukhov, 158, 569, 570 

Siverkin, 551 

Sivers, 44n 

Skripnikova, Anna P., 65-66, 98, 

307, 322, 599, 656-64 

Skuratov, Malyuta (Grigory L. 

Belsky), 47, 689 

Skvortsov, 382 

S1iozberg (Adamova-Sliozberg), 

Olga L., 128, 130, 327, 627 

Sloboda, Lyosha, 423 

SLON see Special Purpose Camps 

Slutsky, Boris A., 488, 689 

Smeshko, 551 

Smimov, 549 

Smirnov, Ivan N., 318, 68lI 

Smotritsky, ,. F., 44n 

Snegiryev, Volodya, 462-63 

Social Democrats, 12-13 

Socialist Revolutionary Party, 11, 

12-13, 334 

socialists, 12-13, 54, 55, 309, 318 

~ykstinorfoS Vladimir V., 689 

Sokolov, 379 

Sokolov, 406 

Sokovikov, 351 

Solikamlag, 73 

Solikamsk,247,497, 594 

Solomonov, 288 

Solovetsky Islands (Solovki): 

description of, 25, 27, 43 

monastic life, 25n, 27-28; 30-31 

as prison (1718-1903), 28-29 

as Special Purpose Camp, 18-19, 

29-31, 34-70, 72, 73, 88, 98, 

102-03, 120, 123, 127, 137-38, 

229, 241, 464, 543, 562, 578, 582, 

642ft, 661, 671: camps spawned 

from, 72, 73, 74: Chlldren's 

Colony, 35, 60-61, 62, 67: 

escapes, 58-60; Gorky's visi~· to, . 

60-63, 523; magazines and 

newspapers, 39 (see also The 

Solovetsky IslandS); Medical 

Section, 36, 48, 51, 60: number 

of prisoners, 43, 72; punishment, 

36, 43, 48, 49, 54, 61; stool 

pigeons, 48-49, 359; thieves' 

commune, 68-69 

The Solovetsky Islands (Solovetskiye 

Ostrova), 19, 30, 34n, 35, 39, 

44, 55, 57, 58, 63 

Solovyev, Vladimir S., 193-94, 1189 

Solovyov, 558 

Solovyov, A. A., 643 . . 

Solts, Aron A., 60, 63, 99, 470,. 689 

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.: ''The 

Easter Procession," 310, 676ft 

exile, 367-69 . 

The First Circle, 675n, .6711n, 678n; 

see also imprisonment, Marfino 

below 

imprisonment, 158,259, 344n, 360, 

489, 613-17 passim; Dutyrki, 227, 

501: in camp theatricals, 

496-97,501; E1dbastuz, 62S-26, 

671; Ivanovo, 456-57: ~uga 

Gates, 202, 232, 236, 266-90, 

. 360, 426-27, 499-501, .544, 545, 

556, 568n, 569-73, 591: . 

Krasnaya Presnya, 228: Marfino, 

147-49, 260-61, 366-67, 479~ 

481, 676ft: NOVY Iyerusa1im, 

,6~61 190-97 passim, 266, 

360-66 . 

on the intelligentsia, 280-81 

on literature, 174-75, 489, 

489n-491n 

The Love Girl and the Innocent, 

- 232ft,675n 

military career, 175, 183,290-91 

One Day in the Life of Ivan 

. Denisovich: author on, 256, 257, 

258, 264-65, 307..;08, 337, 

649: CommunistS on, 209; 

Moskovskaya Pravda on, 344: 

Shalamov on, 203n-204n 

and Sbalamov, 203n-204n, 214-15, 

218 .' 

tumor operation and recovery, 612, 

614,632 

on writing Gulag Archipelago, 

213-14 

Sorokin, Gennady, 300, 397 

Sosikov, 379 

Sovetskaya Gavan, 565, 592 

Spassk. 248, 325 

Special Doards (080), 319, 602

Special Camps (Osoblagi), 317, 560, 

627-28 

Special Purpose Camps (SLON), 

18-20, 72-73, 674n; see also 

Kem; Solovetsky Islands 

Spiridonov, 333 

. Spiridonova, Mariya A., 333, 689 

Stadnikov, 542 

Stakhanovites, 192, 203, 327 

Stalevskaya, 529n 

Stalin,.IoSif V., 72, 121, 587, 678n 

amnesty (1945), 136, 187-91 ptJ8sim, 

620;670 

death, 337 

and Frenkel, 78, 139 

and Gorky, 63n 

juveniles, laws made more 

stringent on, 448-49, 463 

nation, definition of, 504 

personality cult, 344, 676n 

purges and Party arrests, 331, 332 

segregation by sex in schools and 

camps,246 

''Six Conditions," 106, 582, 583 

thieves, laws made more stringent 

on, 428, 429, 4~6 

White Sea-Baltic Canal, 86, 87, 89, 

92,96,99 . 

Stalingrad. BattIe of, 378 

Starokadomsky, Mikhall L., 689 

Statnikov, A. M., 217n 

Stekiov, Yuri M., 333, 689 

Steplag, 222, 249, 373, 549, 583-84 

Stepovol, Aleksandr F., 357-58 

Stolberg, Anna, 651 

Stolyarova, N., 239, 561 

stool pigeons, 48, 125, 297, 353-74, 

477, 598, 609, 636, 642-43, 647 

in camp (stukach; "knocker''), 

48-49, 125, 128, 261, 351-59 

ptJ8Sim, 372, 389, 398, 420, 518, 

612,624 

in prison (nasedka; "sitting hen"), 

353 

seksoty, 353, 676n 

in settlements, 576 

see also prisoners 

Strakhovich, Konstantin I., ·394, 482-83 

Stuchka (Stucka), Pyotr I., 144, 146, 

689 

students: arrests and imprisonment, 

47, 64 

teachers' research stolen by, 644 

subbotniki ("voluntary Saturdays''), 

14, 154-55, 470;~73n 

Sukhanov, A. P., 44n 

Suleimanov, 216-17 

Surovtseva, Nadezhda, 60, 130, 228, 

651 

INDEX 709 

Susi, Arnold Y., 458-59, 493, 494, 

603-04 

Sverdlovsk: prison, 335 

Sverdlovsk-39, 407, 593 

SvetIichny, 549 

Svirlag, 72 

Svirskaya, Ellochka, 294 

Svistnplyas, 129 

Sym,21711 

Szabo,325 

Tabaterov, 555 

Tadzhiks, 88 

Taishet, 565 

Talaga, 585-86 

Tambov: prison, 11 

Tanev, Vasil, 638, 689 

Tarantin, Tolya, 316-17 

Tarasenko, 549 

Tarashkevich, 604 

Tatars, 560 

Taube,44n 

Temir-Tau,565 

Tendryakov, Vladimir F., 426, 689 

Three, Seven, Ace, 426 

Tenno,647 

Tess (Sosyura), Tatyana N.,. 1S3, 689 

thievery: by besprizorniki, 427-28, 

447,677n 

by camp personnel, 159, 555, 568, 

584 

by trusties, 261, 262-63 

thieves (blatnye; urki), 34, 61-62, 66, 

67,68,92-93, 171, 172-73,223, 

305, 306, 307, 309, 343, 359, 

364-65, 383, 388, 389, 390, 

394-95, 425-46, 461, 469, 568 

beatings by, 126, 388, 421, 436, 

438,445 

"bitches" ("half-breeds"), 126, 190, 

347.-359, 422, 428, 437, 438, 530 

as camp instructors, 436, 469 

courts (pravilki), 445 

drugs used by, 441 

escape attempts almost nonexistent, 

394-95,397 , 

food and .living accommodations, 

93, 202, 435-36, 440; India 

(barracks), 395, 417. 

general work, 93, 115, 127, 1S7, 

442; see also punishment and 

penalty work below 

language, 529-30; see also 

prisoners, langUage 

oral literature, 395, 436, 443 

otritsalovka ("rejecters',), 308 

principle/law, 307, 428, 434n, 

520, 564, 676n 

in prison, 446, 666 

INDEX 

thieves (continued) 

punishment and penalty work, 117, 

417, 419, 421-22, 423 • 

sentences, 428, 429, 436, 445-46; 

amnesty (1945), 136, 188, 190 

and "suckers" (frayer), 422, 434n, 

445,531 

tattooing, 441 

as trusties, 115, 255, 343 

,n~mow. 66, 67, 225, 243, 245, 420, 

421,624 

WO!"ld War n, released for serVice, 

442 

see also "Four-sixths" law; 

prisoners; "Seven-eighths" law 

Tikhon, Patriarch, 311, 332-33, 

689 

Tikhonov, Aleksandr N., 82, 689 

Timofeyev-Ressovsky, Nikolai V., 

606, 689 

TitOY, 549 

Tkach, 557 

Tkachenko, 407 

Todorsky, Aleksandr I., 344-45, . 

346, 348, 352, 689 

Tokarskaya, 498. 

Tolstoi, Aleksei N.,82, 1000, 638, 

689 

Tolstoi, Lev, 211, 616 

Tonshayevo, 396, 558, 565 

TopUio, Vsevolod, 498-99. 

Topnikova, Nadezhda ~ 651-52, 

652-53 . 

Torgsin, 77 

Torzhok: Boris and Gleb ~onastery, 

74 

Trans-Siberian Railroad, 76, 80, 

235, 592 

Treivish, 625 

Tretyukhin, Volodya, 299 

Trotsky, Lev D., 141, 296, 299, 

09~86 . 

labor armies, 20, 72 

Trotskyites: arrests and imprisonment, 

134, 315, 317-21, 387-90, 

442 

Trushlyakov, 478-;79 

trusties, 115, 153, 158, 180, 230, 

251-65, 306, 348, 418, 675n 

. Communists as, 345, 348, 349 

food, clothing, and living 

accommodationil, 202, 252, 253, 

263 

as guards, 44, 45, 47-48, 250,- 

251, 254, 264, 392, 562-63, 622 

political prisoners as, 25 I-52, 254, 

255, 345 

thievery hy, 261, 262-63 

thieves as, 115, 255, 343 

women as, 230, 231, 248, 253 

women prisoners kept by, 229-30, 

240 


Trutnev, 317, 676n 

Tsarist regime, 10, 292, 309, 3.10, 427 

Arakcheyev settlJ:ments, 154, 675n, 

. fi71J 

Okhrana, 317 

prisons and camps, 22, 76, 78, 124n, 

200-01,203-04,207, 223n, 599; 

see 41so Akatui; Dostoyevsky, 

Fyodor M., on hard labor; 

Sakhalin; Yakubovich, Pyotr F. 

serfs, 149-54, 239, 500, 513, 540, 

541, 544-45, 546,.674n 

TseitIin, 44n 

Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin E., 479, 690 

Tsukanov, 551, 678n 

Tsvetkova, Yelizaveta, 327 

Tuchinskaya, Irina, 295 

Tukhachevsky, Mikhail N., 332, 333, 

608, 639, 690 

tukhta/tufta, 69, 95, 158, 160-67 

pfJ66lm, 571 .. 5n 

and principle of "rubber," 166, 511, 

512 ' 

Tula, 294, 565 

Tumarkin, 571 

Tungwta, 95 

Tungus,396 

Tura-38, 407, 593 

Turgenev, Ivan S., 500 

Turkmenians; 88 

Turovsky, S. A~ 332 

Tynyanov, Yurl N., 174, ·690 

Tyutchev, Fyodor I., 657, 690 

Uborevich, Iyeronim P., 333, 690 

Uborevich, Mira, 228 

Ultlich, 483 

Ukhta, 55-56, 73, 122, 132,207,420, 

593j.-see also. UkhtPechlag 

Ukhtarkil, 387, 389 . 

Ukhtlag,73 

UkhtPechlag, 73, 134; see also Inta; 

Pechora; ·Ukhta; Vorkuta 

Ukraine/Ukrainians, 98n, 667 

"Banderlsts," 3570, 411, 412, 

676n 

camps and labor colonies, .18, 75, 

S82,642n 

zakbidnitsy, 245 . 

Ulbricht, Walter, 345n 

Ulyanov, Aleksandr I., 316, 690 

United States: Marshall Plan, 280 

"observerS' commissions," 125n 

Unshlikht, losif 8., 333; 690 

Unzha, 210; 396

UDZblag, 167, 240-41, 244, 247, 249, 

350n; 476-77, 540, 622 

Camp No. 13, 546 

urld, see thieves 

Urusov, Leonid 0., 427, 690 

UBIIIlI, 463 

Usollag, 138, 261, 549. 

Usolye, 138 

Uspensky, 64-65, 91 

Ust-Nera, 436n-437n 

_ 

Ust-Vym, 131, 138, 162-66 passim, 

206,,221,.379, 393, 540, 551, 

586,594 

Camp No.3, 546-47, 559 

USVitIag (Administration of 

m~saehtroN Camps), 128 

. Utiny Golil1ields, 126, 318 

Utkina, Manya, 543 

Utyosov, Leonid 0., 425 

Uzkov, 320 

Vadbolsky, 44ft . . 

Vakhtangov, Yevgeny B., 500, 690 

Va1dai Monastery, 74 

Vasilyev,4O 

Vasilyev, Pavel N., 175, 690 

Vasivenko, P. G., 44ft 

.Vavnov, Nikolai I., 314, 640; 644,690 

Vavilov, Sergei I., 638, 690 , 

Venediktova, Galy&, 248-49, 610 

Verail, V. V., 320 

Verkhn@-Uralsk, 320 

Vesly.398 

Vilenchik, Nikolai A., 328 

Vilna, 547 . 

V/nograddv, Borii'M., 324 

Vinogradov, Vladimir' N., 639, 690 

Vishnevetsky, 549 

Vishnevsky, Vsevolod V., 425, 690 

Vltkovsky, Dmitri P., 81, 99, 152,314 

Half a Lifetime, 99 

Vladimir: prison, 600, 663 

Vladimir A1eksandrovich, Grand 

Duke,29n 

Vladlmir-Volynsk, 599 

Vladivostok, 125 

Vlasov, Andrei A., 690 

Vlasov, I~or, 633 

Vlasov, Vasily G., 162, 163-64, 165, 

264,275,540,620 

Vlasov nien, 621 

VNUS (Internal Service), 23 

Voichenko, M. A., 626 

Volno-Yasenetsky, Valentin F. 

. (Archbishop Luke), 310-12 

VOKhR (Militarized Guard Service), 

23,92,557-62,566 

Volga-Don Canal, 88, 591 

Volgolag, 294, 579, 667 • 

INDEX 711 

Volkonskaya, Marlya N., 200-01, 690 

Volkov, 150, 541 

Vplkov, O. V., 44n 

"Grandfathers," 220n 

volnyashki see free employees 

Voloshln, Makslmilian A., 333, 690 

Vonlyarlyarsky, 44n 

Vorkuta, 73, 155, 203, 319, 376, 

383-84,476,482,497,593 

. "earth-moving'" camp, 419, 421 

hunger strikes, 319-20, 387 

"Kashketln" executions, 386-90 

LIme Factory, 422 

see also UkhtPechlag 

Vorkuta-Vom, 416 

Vorkutlag, 320, 549, 552 

Voronov, 599 

Voroshilov, Kliment Y., 96, 654, 691 

"Voroshilov Amnesty," 431 

Vostrikov, Andrei I .. 644 

Voyeikov, P. M., 44n 

VTsIK see All-Russian Central 

Executive Committee 

Vul,4O 

Vyatkin, Viktor: M~ Is Born Twice, 

351n 

Vyatlag, 133 

Camp No ... l, 359 

Vypirailo, 487 

Vyshinsky, Andrei Y.: penal theory, 

13n, 18n, 22ft, 54n, 74n, 75n, 

103, 104, 121", i44-45, 146, ~29n, 

235,304n, 448n, 449. 468n, 475n, 

539n, 562ft, 582n, 691 

The Waterfront at Dawn, 432 

White Russians: as camp guards, 46, 

" 47-49,64 

as prisoners, 19, 20, 21, 88 

White Sea-Baltic Canal (Delomor), 

78, 86-93, 95,..96;"98-104 passim, 

105n, 109, 111, 113, 143, 436, 

437,443.528,562,579,582,591, 

607n. 622, 661 

book on (edited by Gorky, 

Averbakh, Firin), 80-89 passim, 

91, 92, 93, 100, 103, 275 

women prisoners, 66-67, 136, 225-50 

abortion, 243 

cessation of female functions, 228, 

236 

children born In canip, 67, 238, 

241-47 passim 

gang rape ("streetcar"), 234 

general work, 109, Ill, 147, 181, 

191,235,236,240,247,249-50 

kept by chiefs, 147, ISO 

kept by trUBties, 229-30, 240 

Lesbians, 249 

712 INDEX 

women prisoners' (continued) 

liaisons and romances, 230, 231, 

232, 237-41 passim, 247, 248, 

561; camp wives (zechka), 150, 

224, 225, 237, 238, 240, 241, 247, 

249, 435, 675n 

"nuns" and religious believers, 42, 

67, 245, 310, 323, 419, 420, 421, 

464, 625 

,~utitsorp 66-67, 624 

punishment, 128, 148, 239, 419, 

420, 624 . 

release before end Of term, 67, 

190, 238, 245 

in separate camps and prisons, . 

234-35, 246, 249, 561 

as servants, 67, 147, 150,231,235 

"shack-up," 224, 232-33 

thieves, 66, 67, 225, 243, 245, 420, 

421,624 

as trusties, 230, 231, 248, 253 


World War I: concentration camps, 17 

World War II, 42ft, 133, 134, 289, . 

371, 378, 498n, 549, 560 

amnesty for deserters see amnesty 

(1945) . 

camps, 126, 130-37 passim, 262, 

378, 594; custodial personnel, 

126, 378-79, 381, 392, 556, 

560-61; death rate, 98, 132; 

executioDS, 347 376-77; food, 

132, 133, 199, 203; prisoners 

detained and resenteDced, 1.31-32, 

134, 180, 376-77, 380-81; 

prisoners released for service, 

131, 134-35, 442 ~ 

labor detachment of conscriptees, 

667 

"obstacle" detachments, 378, 677n 

. prisoners of war, 187, 308-09, 480, 

545 

Yagoda, Genrikh G., 84, 92, 95-96, 

99, 181, 473n, 538, 608, 691 

Yakir, lona E., 332, 691 

Yakovenko,433 . 

Yakovenko, Vasily M., 627 

Yakovlev, 352 

Yakubovicb, Pyotr P., 76n, 200, 203, 

205n, 427, 532, 599, 620n, 628, 

631,649,691 

In the World 0/ thp OutCDStS, 649 

Yakusbeva, loya, 238 

Yakuts, 395-96 

Yaroslavl, 60, 156 

Yaroslavsky, A., 48 

Yasensky, B~o, 82 

Yasblta. 621 

Yashkevich, A1eksandr, 331 

Yegorov, 308, 552 

Yegorov, Ateksandr I., 332, 333, 691 

Yenisei, 535 

Yenukidze, Avel S., 333, 691 

Yermolov, Yura, 452-53, 454, 463 

Yeryomin,645 

Yesenin; Sergei A., 300 . 

Yesenina, Tatyana: Zhenya, the 

Miracle 0/ the 20th Cent'try, 426 

YeYlusbenko, Yevgeny: 

AutobiogrDhy, 334, 676ft 

The Bratsk Power Station, 334 

Yezbov, Nikolai I., 121, 181, 318n, 

333, 535, 538, 646, 691 

Yubileiny Goldfields, 319 

Yuglag, 129 

Zaborsky, 346, 348 

Zadomy, V1adilen, 561-62, 563 

Zakharov, 338, 348 

Zakbarov, Aleksandr, 431 

Zakovsk, 463 

Zaleska, loya, 600 . 

Zaozersky,.Alekaandr I., 44n, 691 

Zarin, 65, 66 

Zarin, V. M~ 336 

Zarossby Spring, 126, 585. 

Zavenyagin, Avraami P., 276, 535, 691 

zek: derivation of term, 506-07 

see also prisoners . 

Zeldin, 127 

Zelenkov, 129 

ZellDsky, Komeli L, 82, 691 " 

Zhdanov, Andrei A., 74 

Zheltov, M •• 668, 669 

Zhloba, 333 

Zhugur, Zelma, 654 

Zhuk. Sergei Y., 99, 691 

. Zhukov, 549 

Zbukov, Georgi (Yuri) A., 579, 691 

Zhnkov.-V. I~ 652ft . 

Zhukova,386 . 

Zhuravsky, 298 

Zhurin. 87-88 

Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), Grigory Y •• 

301, 333, 535, 608, 691 

Zinovyev. Pavel N., 268, 272. 273-77. 

281, 282. 283. 360 

Zolotisty Goldfields, 129. 131n 

Zolotnikov, Grigory. 320 

Z08bchenko, Mikhail M., 82. 86, 691 

Zosima. 49. 691 . 

Zozulya, 571 

Zubov. N. 1..189.227-28,240 

Zverev, 357n

The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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