More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
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 the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based.” And there you are—the Archipelago managed miraculously to combine the one and the other.
But as one of his eternal, disastrous traits the human being is incapable of grasping the ratio of an object to its price.
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 state required, and when he broke, they brushed him into the garbage bin. 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 him less.
To an observer on the sidelines it seems strange: why set one’s own plans in conflict with one another? Oh, but there is a profound meaning in it! Conflicting plans flatten the human being. This is a principle which far transcends the barbed wire of the Archipelago.
There is no one to tell about it either. They all died.
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.
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 intellectual 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.
It has been known for centuries that Hunger … 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 painfully to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor is receiving. Hunger, which
...more
and I do not at all believe that it will explain the truth of our history in time for anything to be corrected.
But there is one form of early release that no bluecap can take away from the prisoner. This release is—death. And this is the most basic, the steadiest form of Archipelago output there is
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 could still be used for the living) but to bury them naked.
Work well and you, too, will be buried in a wooden coffin.
Now that, fair reader, is how your father, your husband, your brother, was buried.
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.
“work, the miracle worker which transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes”?
If there were a crane … then these women would simply wallow in insignificance!
But from its unfleshly character, as the women remember today, the spirituality of camp love became even more profound. 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!
A deaf and dumb carpenter got a term for counterrevolutionary agitation! How? He was laying floors in a club. Everything 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.
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.
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.
and in camp they found it hardest of all to reconcile themselves to extinction, and they fought fiercest of all to rise above the universal zero.
It was more than the human heart could 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.
As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchik said, after serving seventeen years: “We believed in the Party—and we were not mistaken!” 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.
for the entire epoch covered by this book almost the only eyes and almost the only ears of the ChekaGB were stool pigeons.
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.
A stone is not a human being, and even stones get crushed.
But in our country everything is permissible. When a man is flat 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.”
During the period of the Five-Year Plans and of the metastases, they began to employ the second camp term instead of the bullet.
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.
And there is only one salvation for a person: to be a zero! A total zero. A zero from the very beginning.
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. Later on 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.
The strongest of these chains was the prisoners’ universal submission and total surrender to their situation as slaves.
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.
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.
(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!
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.
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.
But when this elegant theory came down to earth in camps, here is what emerged from it: The most inveterate and hardened thieves were given unbridled power on the islands of the Archipelago,
The central thieves, the top-level thieves, totally controlled the camp districts.
In that year the Great Evildoer once more left his thumbprint on History’s submissive clay.
Perhaps in all world history no one has yet approached such a radical solution of the problem of children!
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. The kid masters the truth: If other teeth are weaker than your own, then tear the piece away from them. It belongs to you!
That is how small stubborn Fascists were trained by the joint action of Stalinist legislation, a Gulag education, and the leaven 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.
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 place over a period of
...more
And some didn’t have to get used to it; they had been that way from the start.
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.
Arrogance.
