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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Apropos of the orthodox Communists, Stalin was necessary, for such a purge as that, yes, but a Party like that was necessary too: the majority of those in power, up to the very moment of their own arrest, were pitiless in arresting others, obediently destroyed their peers in accordance with those same instructions and handed over to retribution any friend or comrade-in-arms of yesterday.

Perhaps 1937 was needed in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth—that ideology of which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning Russia upside down, destroying its foundations, trampling everything it held sacred underfoot, that Russia where they themselves had never been threatened by such retribution.

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

Although we were front-line officers, Nikolai V. and I, who were involved in the same case, got ourselves into prison through a piece of childish stupidity. He and I corresponded during the war, between two sectors of the front; and though we knew perfectly well that wartime censorship of correspondence was in effect, we indulged in fairly outspoken expressions of our political outrage and in derogatory comments about the Wisest of the Wise, whom we labeled with the transparently obvious nickname of Pakhan or Ringleader of the Thieves. (When, later on, I reported our case in various prisons, our naivete aroused only laughter and astonishment. Other prisoners told me that two more such stupid jackasses couldn’t exist. And I became convinced of it myself. Then suddenly, one day, reading some documents on the case of Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother, I learned that he and his confederates got caught in exactly the same way—a careless exchange of letters. And that was the only reason Alexander III didn’t die on March 1,1887.)

in 1950, one of the leading colonels of the MGB, Foma Fomich Zheleznov, said to his prisoners: “We are not going to sweat to prove the prisoner’s guilt to him. Let him prove to us that he did not have hostile intent.”

Given that interrogations had ceased to be an attempt to get at the truth, for the interrogators in difficult cases they became a mere exercise of their duties as executioners and in easy cases simply a pastime and a basis for receiving a salary.

According to the Code of Criminal Procedure every interrogation was supposed to take two months. And if it presented difficulties, one was allowed to ask the prosecutor for several continuations of a month apiece

Having worked with voice and fist in the initial assault week of every interrogation, and thereby expended one’s will and character (as per Vyshinsky), the interrogators had a vital interest in dragging out the remainder of every case as long as possible. That way more old, subdued cases were on hand and fewer new ones. It was considered just indecent to complete a political interrogation in two months.

My interrogator also made frequent use of the telephone. For example, he used to phone home and tell his wife—with his sparkling eyes directed at me—that he was going to be working all night long so she mustn’t expect him before morning. (My heart, of course, fell. That meant he would be working me over all night long!) But then he would immediately dial the phone number of his mistress and, in purring tones, make a date with her for the night. (So: I would be able to get some sleep! I felt relieved.) Thus it was that the faultless system was moderated only by the shortcomings of those who carried it out.

The Code of Criminal Procedure provided that the prosecutor was to review continuously the course of every interrogation to ensure its being conducted correctly. But no one in our time ever saw him face to face until the so-called “questioning by the prosecutor,” which meant the interrogation was nearing its end.

He was required by law to ask what complaints I had about the conduct of the interrogation and whether coercion had been used or any violations of my legal rights had occurred. But it had been a long time since prosecutors asked such questions. And what if they had?

I opened the cover of the thick file, and there, on the inside of the cover in printed text, I read an astonishing statement. It turned out that during the interrogation I had had the right to make written complaints against anything improper in its conduct, and that the interrogator was obliged to staple these complaints into my record! During the interrogation! Not at its end. Alas, not one of the thousands with whom I was later imprisoned had been aware of this right.

And so I signed. I signed it complete with Section 11, the significance of which I did not then know. They told me only that it would not add to my prison term. But because of that Section 111 was later put into a hard-labor camp. Because of that Section 11 I was sent, even after “liberation,” and without any additional sentence, into eternal exile. Maybe it was all for the best. Without both those experiences, I would not have written this book.

Although others might not be aware of it, it was clear to the interrogators at least that the cases were fabricated. Except at staff conferences, they could not seriously say to one another or to themselves that they were exposing criminals. Nonetheless they kept right on producing depositions page after page to make sure that we rotted. So the essence of it all turns out to be the credo of the blatnye—the underworld of Russian thieves: “You today; me tomorrow.” They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), and simply accepted that this was the way it had to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always right. . . But didn’t the Nazis, too, it comes to mind, argue that same way?1

The bluecaps understood the workings of the meat grinder and loved it. In the Dzhida camps in 1944, interrogator Mironenko said to the condemned Babich with pride in his faultless logic: “Interrogation and trial are merely judicial corroboration. They cannot alter your fate, which was previously decided. If it is necessary to shoot you, then you will be shot even if you are altogether innocent. If it is necessary to acquit you,3 then no matter how guilty you are you will be cleared and acquitted.”

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. I tossed out orders to my subordinates that I would not allow them to question, convinced that no orders could be wiser. Even at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human being.

One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

How many wars Russia has been involved in! (It would have been better if there had been fewer.) And were there many traitors in all those wars? Had anyone observed that treason had become deeply rooted in the hearts of Russian soldiers? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and out of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained? Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in that same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them, the businessman “Lord Haw Haw”—but in our country millions? It is frightening to open one’s trap about this, but might the heart of the matter not be in the political system?

All the Western peoples behaved the same in our war: parcels, letters, all kinds of assistance flowed freely through the neutral countries. The Western POW’s did not have to lower themselves to accept ladlefuls from German soup kettles. They talked back to the German guards. Western governments gave their captured soldiers their seniority rights, their regular promotions, even their pay. The only soldier in the world who cannot surrender is the soldier of the world’s one and only Red Army. That’s what it says in our military statutes. (The Germans would shout at us from their trenches: “Ivan plen nicht!”—“Ivan no prisoner!”) Who can picture all that means? There is war; there is death—but there is no surrender! What a discovery! What it means is: Go and die; we will go on living. And if you lose your legs, yet manage to return from captivity on crutches, we will convict you. (The Leningrader Ivanov, commander of a machine-gun platoon in the Finnish War, was subsequently thus imprisoned in Ustvymlag, for example.)

For not wanting to die from a German bullet, the prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner of war! Some get theirs from the enemy; we get it from our own! Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.

In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians. In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.

However, in 1945, in the very center of Soviet jurisdiction, they were charged with: actions directed toward the overthrow of the government of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets; armed incursion into Soviet territory, in other words, not having immediately left Russia when Petrograd was declared Soviet; aiding the international bourgeoisie (which they had never seen even in their dreams); serving counterrevolutionary governments (i.e., their own generals, to whom they had been subordinate all their lives). And all these sections—Nos. 1, 2, 4, 13—of Article 58 were included in a Criminal Code adopted in 1926, that is, six to seven years after the end of the Civil War. This was a classic and unconscionable example of the ex post facto application of a law! In addition, Article 2 of the Code specified that it applied only to citizens taken into custody on the territory of the Russian Republic. But State Security’s strong right arm had grabbed people who were in no wise Soviet citizens from all the countries of Europe and Asia.

Once again I was in the Butyrki, and in one of those seventy cells I met some young codefendants of Yasevich who had already been sentenced to ten and fifteen years. The sentences given everyone in their group were typed out on cigarette paper, and for some reason they had it in their possession. Yasevich was first on the list, and his sentence was: to be shot. So that was what he saw—what he foresaw—through the wall with his still-young eyes as he paced back and forth from the table to the door! But his unimpaired consciousness of the correctness of his path in life lent him extraordinary strength.

We brushed aside those wise individuals among us who explained that millions of us were imprisoned precisely because the war had ended. We were no longer needed at the front. We were dangerous in the rear. And, were it not for us, not one brick would ever get laid at the remote construction projects. We were too self-absorbed even to grasp Stalin’s simple economic calculations—let alone his malice.

We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism—this concept of “guilt,” and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly.

The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan.

In all probability, an excellent judicial system is the last fruit of the most mature society, or else one needs a Solomon.

The second main characteristic of our political courts is the lack of ambiguity in their work, which is to say predetermined verdicts.4 In other words, you, a judge, always know what the higher-ups expect of you (furthermore there’s a telephone if you still have any doubts). And, following the example of the OSO’s, sentences might even be typed out ahead of time, with only the prisoner’s name to be added later, by hand.

But it is not the judge who judges. The judge only takes his pay. The directives did the judging. The directive of 1937: ten years; twenty years; execution by shooting. The directive of 1943: twenty years at hard labor; hanging. The directive of 1945: ten years for everyone, plus five of disenfranchisement7 (manpower for three Five-Year Plans). The directive of 1949: everyone gets twenty-five.

A Soviet citizen who had returned from the United States had made the slanderous statement that there were good automobile roads in America—and nothing else. That was all there was to the case. The judge ventured to send the case back for further investigation for the purpose of getting “genuine anti-Soviet materials”—in other words, so that the accused could be beaten and tortured. But his praiseworthy intention wasn’t taken into account. The angry answer came back: “You mean you don’t trust our Organs?” And, in the upshot, the judge was exiled to the post of secretary of a military tribunal on Sakhalin!

M. Latsis, in his popular review of the Cheka’s activity,2 gives us material for only a year and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces of Central Russia (“The figures presented here are far from complete,”3 in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389 persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine);4 counterrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic figure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization throughout our history and also the general isolation of individuals in those years and the general psychological depression); the total of those arrested—87,0005 (and this figure smells of understatement). What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In 1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays entitled Against Capital Punishment,6 in which are listed by name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to 1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that there were some additional victims, whose names remain unknown, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly not so incomplete as Latsis’ materials compiled during the Civil War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an additional 270, who were sentenced in absentia and never caught (for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That leave...

The courts were of three kinds: the people’s courts, the circuit courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the Revtribunals. The people’s courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and nonpolitical criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people’s court could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding two years.

From the beginning, the circuit courts and the Revtribunals had the power to impose the death sentence, but they lost it for a brief period: the circuit courts in 1920, and the Revtribunals in 1921.

every time a city was captured during the Civil War the event was marked not only by gunsmoke in the courtyards of the Cheka, but also by sleepless sessions of the tribunal. And you did not have to be a White officer, a senator, a landowner, a monk, a Cadet, an SR, or an Anarchist in order to get your bullet. Soft white uncallused hands alone were sufficient in those years.

Because there was no end to the number of peasant uprisings and revolts from 1918 to 1921, even though they did not adorn the colored pages of the official History of the Civil War, and even though no one photographed them, and no one filmed motion pictures of those furious crowds attacking machine guns with clubs, pitchforks, and axes and, later, lined up for execution with their arms tied behind their backs—ten for one! The revolt in Sapozhok is remembered only in Sapozhok; the one in Pitelino only in Pitelino. We learn from Latsis the number of peasant rebellions that were suppressed during that same year and a half in twenty provinces—344.9

the glorious accuser in the greatest trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people, N. V. Krylenko.13 And if, despite everything, we want to attempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first postrevolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and everything that happened in the provinces too. Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those Revtribunal members as well. However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of technical reasons “it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic records”14 It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals, which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the demands of the accuser-prosecutor.

Krylenko formulated even more frankly and precisely the general tasks of the Soviet courts in his speeches before those tribunals, when the court was “at one and the same time both the creator of the law [Krylenko’s italics] . . . and a political weapon”21 (My italics.)

The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary is that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted.25 And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was not that kind of court! On another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at all: “A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies” and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution . . . having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants.”26 People are not people, but “carriers of specific ideas.”27 “No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency”

And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant’s burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. “We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”

A. The Case of “Russkiye Vedomosti”

It may seem strange to us now, but it is a fact that in those thunderous years bribes were given and taken just as tenderly as they had been from time immemorial in Old Russia and as they will be in the Soviet Union from here to eternity. Bribery was particularly rife in the judicial organs. And, though we blush to say it, in the Cheka. The official histories in their red, gold-stamped bindings are silent about this, but the old folks and eyewitnesses remember that the fate of political prisoners in the first years of the Revolution, as distinct from Stalinist times, often depended on bribes: they were accepted uninhibitedly, and prisoners were honestly released as a result. Although Krylenko picked out only a dozen cases for the five-year period his book covers, he reports two cases of bribery. Alas, even the Moscow Tribunal and the Supreme Tribunal squeezed their way through to perfection along a crooked path, muddied themselves in improprieties.

B. The Case of the Three Interrogators of the Moscow Revtribunal—April, 1918

C. The Case of Kosyrev—February 15, 1919

“Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all. . . . We know of many examples of persons in our ranks branded by such facts in the past, but we have never drawn the conclusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our milieu. A person who knows our principles cannot fear that the existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolutionaries.”42 That is how Comrade Krylenko could speak when in a Party vein.

D. The Case of the “Churchmen”—January 11–16, 1920

We beg the reader, throughout, to keep in mind: from 1918 on, our judicial custom determined that every Moscow trial, except, of course, the unjust trial of the Chekists, was by no means an isolated trial of an accidental concatenation of circumstances which had converged by accident; it was a landmark of judicial policy; it was a display-window model whose specifications determined what product was good for the provinces too; it was a standard; it was like that one-and-only model solution up front in the arithmetic book for the schoolchildren to follow for themselves.

The judicial and the extrajudicial persecution of the liberated church had begun well back in 1918, and, judging by the Zvenigorod affair, it had already reached a peak of intensity by that summer. In October, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon had protested in a message to the Council of People’s Commissars that there was no freedom to preach in the churches and that “many courageous priests have already paid for their preaching with the blood of martyrdom. . . . You have laid your hands on church property collected by generations of believers, and you have not hesitated to violate their posthumous intent.” (The People’s Commissars did not, of course, read the message, but the members of their administrative staff must have had a good laugh: Now they’ve really got something to reproach us with—posthumous intent! We sh-t on your ancestors! We are only interested in descendants.) “They are executing bishops, priests, monks, and nuns who are guilty of nothing, on the basis of indiscriminate charges of indefinite and vaguely counterrevolutionary offenses.” True, with the approach of Denikin and Kolchak, this was stopped, so as to make it easier for Orthodox believers to defend the Revolution. But hardly had the Civil War begun to die down than they took up their cudgels against the church again, and the cases started rolling through the tribunals once more. In 1920 they struck at the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery and went straight to the holy relics of that chauvinist Sergius of Radonezh...

E. The Case of the “Tactical Center”—August 16–20, 1920

In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919—which we have already cited—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky’s attempts to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, commenting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia of those years (the “close-to-the-Cadets intelligentsia”), he wrote: “In actual fact they are not [the nation’s ] brains, but shit.”56 On another occasion he said to Gorky: “If we ]break too many pots, it will be its [the intelligentsia’s] fault.”57 If the intelligentsia wants justice, why doesn’t it come over to us? “I’ve gotten one bullet from the intelligentsia myself.”58 (In other words, from Kaplan.) On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; “pious”; “the slovenliness so customary among ‘educated’ people”;59 he believed the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intelligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers?) This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intelligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the publicists and the newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thoughtlessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and t...