Book Review: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: Part Two: “Perpetual Motion,” Chapter One, “The Ships of the Archipelago”
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In part two of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn begins to describe the archipelago itself. Consistent with his likening the Soviet system of prison camps to a series of islands, Solzhenitsyn extends the metaphor by calling the trains that carry prisoners to the gulga the “ships of the archipelago,” with the holding prisons the “ports.” This chapter is devoted to what it was like traveling on these trains, from the way prisoners were hidden between carts at the station and made to sit on the ground with their heads down while everyday citizens carried on with their lives clueless as to the human misery so close to them, to the cramped train cars themselves where prisoners were at the mercy of the blatnye (thieves) who would swipe any valuables the unlucky souls thought they’d be able to bring to the camps with them.
Of course, being as methodical as he is, Solzhenitsyn starts with the train cars themselves–zak cars, or prisoner cars. There is another, more official name, of course: These are Stolypin cars, named for Pyotr Stolypin, Russia’s Prime Minister from 1906 to 1911. Stolypin’s agrarian reforms gave Russian peasants no-interest loans and huge plots of land in exchange for agreeing to settle Siberia. These new train carts were created to transport these settlers, but the enterprising Soviets realized they’d also make a great way to transport prisoners to the camps.
[image error]A Stolypin car
So much for the big, bad, evil pre-revolutionary Russia being the absolute worst.
[image error]Pyotr Stolypin
The Stolypin car is an ordinary passenger car divided into compartments, except that five of the nine compartments are allotted to the prisoners (here, as everywhere in the Archipelago, half of everything goes to the auxiliary personnel, the guards), and compartments are separated from the corridor not by a solid barrier but by a grating which leaves them open for inspection. This grating consists of intersecting diagonal bars, like the kind one sees in station parks. It rises the full height of the car, and because of it there are not the usual baggage racks projecting from the compartments over the corridor. The windows on the corridor sides are ordinary windows, but they have the same diagonal gratings on the outside. There are no windows in the prisoners’ compartments–only tiny, barred blinds on the level of the second sleeping shelves. That’s why the car has no exterior windows and looks like a baggage car. The door into each compartment is a sliding door: an iron frame with bars.
Solzhenitsyn likens the prisoners crammed into the carts to animals in a menagerie, with one important difference: “[I]n menageries they never crowd the wild animals in so tightly.” In Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, some twenty-two prisoners are shoved into each car, with some reports saying that up to thirty-six people had been known to be shoved into a single car. Furthering the prisoners’ misery is that voyages could be long . . . and guards didn’t care who missed their assigned stop or not. It wasn’t as though prisoners really knew where they were going anyway . . .
[image error]“Life is Everywhere,” Nikolai Yaroshenko (1888)
Of course, in conditions like this, even going to the bathroom was an adventure–one trip per day, one at a time! And rations? Yes, prisoners were supposed to have an allotted amount of food and drink. But water could make the prisoners have to use the toilet more, and it was a pain in the neck to give each prisoner (who didn’t have a mug of their own) a drink from the ladle one-by-one, so out went the rationed water. Nevermind that salted herring or Caspian carp was on the menu. The prisoners would have to deal. After all, this wasn’t done to torture the prisoners. It was done for the sake of convenience. Surely they understood the plight of the poor guards.
And bread. But sometimes the guards got a little extra hungry, so down went your rations and up went theirs. Being a guard on a prisoner train was hard work, don’t you know.
Prisoners were lumped together, the political prisoner and the common prisoner alike, regardless of their destinations. And these regular criminals, these blatari, did not care if you were some Communist party so-and-so who believed in the revolution of the proletariat. No, they just wanted your stuff. But this wasn’t done to torture prisoners. Of course not:
After all, was it becaue Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day–and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short. And so he was numbered with the transgressors.
These thieves had free reign of whatever cart they were stuck in. They were given the relative kid gloves treatment by the system, and by the guards. No Article 58 for common criminals! This gives rise to a common phenomenon we still see at work today:
. . . Stalin was always partial to the thieves–after all, who robbed the banks for him? Back in 1901 his comrades in the Party and in prison accused him of using common criminals against his political enemies. From the twenties on, the obliging term “social ally” came to be widely used. That was Makarenko’s contention too: these could be reformed. According to Makarenko, the origin of crime lay solely in the “counterrevolutionary underground.” (Those were the ones who couldn’t be reformed–engineers, priests, SRs, Mensheviks).
And why shouldn’t they steal, if there was no one to put a stop to it? Three or four brazen thieves working hand in glove could lord it over several dozen frightened and cowed pseudo politicals.
With the approval of the administration. On the basis of the Progressive Doctrine.
Sound familiar?
[image error]Anton Makarenko, Soviet educator, social worker, and writer
Naturally, the thieves shared or traded with the guards, who didn’t really care what went on in the Stolypin cars. Like they’d ever intervene! “[A]fter many years of favoring thieves, the convoy has itself become a thief.”
So the best advice became: don’t be a sucker. Don’t bring valuables. Your old life was over the second you were arrested, interrogated, tossed in a prison somewhere in Russia, and then led to one of these trains, these ships of the archipelago, and sent off to a work camp. If you were a political prisoner, you were an enemy of the state and you deserved no mercy.
Terror had a place in the Soviet toolbox, no matter how petty the situation seemed to be.
Takeaways:
The powerful have always used common thugs as their muscle, and they always will.
You can’t count on law enforcement to stick up for you.
If the state decides you’re an enemy to them, absent any constraints with teeth there is no end to the depredations you will be subjected to.
Classism isn’t just about economics or social standing. It also has to do with common interests, usefulness, and allegiance to the state.
