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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This case was important because it involved engineers—or, as they had been christened in the terminology of the times, “specialists,” or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee.) Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories—strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame? Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the “comrades who were often brought in from outside”—i.e., the Communist leaders—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem.”1 And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had refigured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated!