The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Why do you keep going on and on about 1937? What about 1949 on Vanino Bay, in the fifth compound? What about that? There were 35,000! And for several months too! There was another bottleneck in transport to the Kolyma. And every night for some reason they kept driving people from one barracks to another and from one compound to another. Just as it was with the Fascists: Whistles! Screams! ‘Come on out there without the last one!’1 And everyone went on the run! Always on the run! They’d drive a hundred to get bread—on the run! For gruel—on the run! No bowls to eat from. Take the gruel in whatever you could—the flap of your coat, your hands! They brought water in big tanks and there was nothing to distribute it in, so they shot it out in sprays. And whoever could get his mouth in front of one got some. Prisoners began to fight in front of the tanks—and the guards fired on them from the towers. Exactly like under the Fascists! Major General Derevyanko, the Chief of Administration of the Northeast [i.e., Kolyma] Corrective Labor Camps, came, and while he was there an air force aviator stepped out in front of the crowd and ripped his field shirt down the front: ‘I have seven battle decorations! Who gave you the right to shoot into the compound?’ And Derevyanko replied: ‘We shot and we will go on shooting until you learn how to behave.’”2